How Japan's Innovation Training Could Increase Your Employee's Skills
A Japanese Style of Leadership Development
Japanese companies have traditionally provided learning opportunities to their employees in a bid to hone personnel skills on a continuous basis. Specific, targeted training opportunities fall under what is called tier-based training. Having graduated from school and joined a company’s ranks, an employee will receive training aimed at equipping them with the skills and attitude necessary for their professional duties.
Many companies will also provide training, for various specific situations, at set intervals from employment: 6 months, 1 year, 3 years, and so on. This is also done when there is a promotion or something similar. This kind of business attitude is attracting the interest of many talented future graduates. Besides this tier-based training, there is another popular variety of training known as domain-based training. This type of training is aimed at management, customer service, R&D departments, etc.
In recent years, besides tier and domain-based training, many companies have been coming up with programs that adopt their company name and provide training to employees under such designations. Modeled after real universities, these programs offer a variety of elective courses formatted to be accessible to employees. In Japan, this type of program is referred to as a corporate university. (Not an educational institution in the legal sense.)
Carrying Out the Training
The reasoning behind the establishment of corporate university educational programs is not so much the intention of merely improving employees’ management and specialty skills, as it is to “cultivate personnel into having a broad outlook, one that is equally applicable to other domains.”
Under this format, employees do not enroll because they were selected. While there may be cases where a superior’s approval or recommendation may be needed to join a particular course, as a rule, the employee will choose the one they are personally interested in from a variety of training courses available. In parallel with the daily routine of attending lectures, the employee will also be assigned homework and will eventually complete the course by submitting a graduation thesis.
A variety of different options are available to pay for the course. For example, the company and the employee might each cover 50% of the cost with the understanding that, upon successful graduation, the company will fully reimburse the employee’s expense.
The Most Effective Training and What it Means for You
Currently, the most popular course on the curriculum of Japanese corporate universities is on the subject of innovation. At the heart of innovation is the belief that new ideas emerge only after “undoing the straps” that hold one’s way of thinking in a fixed pattern. This consists of making a conscious effort to realign one’s point of view. The purpose of the course is to empower the student to feel capable of accomplishing such a feat.
This is why innovation courses attract so much interest: all available seats are immediately booked as soon as a corporate university introduces one, and there is a long waiting list for cancellations. Innovation is something that a lot of people, regardless of occupation and age bracket, are routinely expected to do. For this reason, a major merit of teaching the subject of innovation in a corporate university setting is the fact that it creates the opportunity for employees, of all titles or seniority, to stand up and put forth ideas as equal members of the group. This has a similar effect to exchanging ideas with people from a different line of business: the experience is refreshing and stimulating and everyone stands to gain from the process.
Companies across the entire spectrum of business are increasingly expected to start adopting the corporate university paradigm and seize a growing number of opportunities to introduce training courses focusing on innovation. It is not a stretch to expect major differences, in terms of growth, between businesses that treat innovation as nothing more than a specialist concern and those that consistently provide a broad range of learning opportunities and promote internal efforts to foster an innovative human resource pool. Now is a good time to consider the question: what can your company do to start providing comprehensive, all-around education opportunities to your employees?
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