He started his working life helping Mr. Burnett establish a branch of his school at Airy Hall, Essequibo Coast, and a few months later was hired as a teacher at Anna Regina Government Primary School and, later then Anna Regina Government Secondary School. While teaching, he took General Certification (GCE) Advanced Level classes through the correspondence school Wolsey Hall, Oxford, in England. H also took in-service training for a Teacher’s Certificate.
Hamaludin got onto journalism after winning short story competitions sponsored by the Guyana Sunday Chronicle for its Christmas Annual, under editor Charles Chichester, who hired him in 1969 as a features writer and Berbice representative. The Guyana government bought the Daily Chronicle and absorbed it in its Guyana Printers Ltd. The new company started publishing a daily newspaper as well, with Carl Blackman as editor-in-chief. Hamaludin was appointed Senior Political Reporter and covered national politics and economics, as well as writing features for the Sunday edition. He was subsequently promoted to Chief Reporter, responsible for covering all major news, particularly politics and related issues, regional and international affairs, economics and finance, and also deputizing for the News Editor as needed. During this time, at the invitation of James Sydney of Radio Demerara, he also gave a weekly five-minute monologue on topics of his choice on the station, named “In Perspective.”
Hamaludin was selected for the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Journalist Project, spending approximately three months in the United States on the work-study-travel program intended to familiarize journalists from developing countries with American life and culture.
He served as Guyana correspondent for several foreign media, including the now defunct Caribbean News Agency (CANA), which was a news service sponsored by regional media and was based in Barbados, as well as The Financial Times and The Economist and the now defunct Gemini News Service, all based in London.
He has worked as a journalist in the Cayman Islands and the Turks & Caicos Islands, as well as the United States, and he traveled to several other countries on assignment, including Canada, Cuba, Egypt, England, India, Ivory Coast, Jamaica, Liberia, Nigeria, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Lucia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Suriname and Trinidad & Tobago.
Probably his most significant assignment was coverage of the Jonestown tragedy in November 1978 for Reuters through the now defunct Caribbean News Agency, for which he received a Reuters commendation.
In the U.S., he worked with two African American weeklies, The Miami Times and South Florida Times (for which he still writes a weekly column) and The Miami Herald. For several years, he was a panelist on “Issues and the Media,” a weekly program on a Miami public television station. He is now retired from active journalism but has been writing a regular column for South Florida Times (sfltimes.com).