Why Digital Education Should be at the Core of Japanese Companies
Something that I’ve learned over the last year is that there are few things more integral to the overall process of development than continuing ones professional education. But I’m not the only one noticing this, as the world moves toward the era of the consumer, so does the evolution of education.
Now more than ever, consumers in the West are opting out of college for their own alternative approach where they can capture skills and talents to optimize their life instead of going through the usual rituals of enrollment, fraternity hazing, and eventually enough student debt to ruin their future financial goals.
The question now is will Japan catch up or could they even possibly lead? As one of the social media agencies in Japan, we do a lot of digital training, which has given us a lot of insights into the future of Japan. But in terms of leadership, only time will tell (or another blog post) but for now let’s chat through why education should be at the center of these organizations and how it can drive them forward.
Current execution is beginning to lose its effectiveness
Read the news and you’ll see that Japan is no longer the assembly and organizational unified powerhouse it used to be. From CEO’s forging profit numbers to employees overworking themselves to death on multiple occasions, something is clearly wrong.
Meanwhile the rest of the world is on fire, using AI and automation tools to develop individual and organizational operational procedures designed to scale companies fast, responsibly, and profitably.
If Japanese companies want to maintain progress, they need to identify a better way to adopt learning and development procedures to create a more effective production cycle through the power of new digital technology.
Employees seek education over execution
Another sad truth, even though people are working themselves to death, this isn’t changing the output of the product one bit. An over obsessiveness with work is leading to an oversight on performance execution. This unfortunately emphasizes the value of doing things culturally right per the task rather than per the process and end result that’s needed to be successful.
As a result of this, actual product execution is losing its mastery and therefor individual inhibition to do better. However, the outside world growing is not new to the Japanese people here. As a result it’s easy to find groups of Japanese more willing to join classes, groups, sessions, and other events where they know they’ll learn something new outside of the normal Japanese structure that they may use to better their life.
Employers can take advantage of this by bringing on experts to assess organizational needs and how they can be solved with digital solutions. The result will be more employee engagement and better business results.
Educated employees are proven to lead to superior results
Sure, teaching companies social media and digital platforms is one thing because we know digital delivers. But what about the results behind learning and development cultures, what do the numbers say there? They deliver too.
Employees in HR studies said they’d welcome more training on a consistent basis. Additionally these numbers supported a lack of employee turnover due to building a better culture around education, and also a positive culture leads to positive work results and performance. For a full infographic, click here.
This is extremely important in Japan as companies look to attract and retain good talent in a consumer advantage led economy.
In short, we could continue but what we can end with is that if Japan wants to be successful in the digital era of now and in the future, companies need to invest more in education to teach their teams how to use and execute new modern technologies to build the business.
Why could Japan still lead in this? Because in Japan there is a term called the Kaizen, which means “Change for the Better”. It refers to the organizational process that has been used to define much of their industrial growth in the last several decades and also what has got them to be the economy they are. However, nothing about Japan now is changing for the better. But there is hope that if CEO’s see the opportunity is really changing for the better to innovate for tomorrow, just about anything is possible in the land of the rising sun.
If you’re a business in Japan and would like to train your team on how to execute digital strategies better, contact us today at hello@definition.media and we can help you get started.
