We would like to train overseas talents who wish to build bridges between their home countries and Japan through memorable international-exchange experiences.

Q.Why did your company decide to take on interns? What did you aim to achieve?

We are a travel company for inbound visitors and we are developing our business by focusing on the Middle East market. We provide luxury travel experiences for affluent clients primarily based in GCC countries. Our suite of consistent services – as part of which we produce specialized plans, make bookings, and provide support for clients during their stay in Japan – is characterized by staying close to our clients. While we can proceed with operations in English without difficulty, we believed that talented person who is fluent in Arabic is needed to substantially gain the trust of our clients since their mother tongue is Arabic.
Training overseas talents who are partial to Japan is also an important objective. We wanted to provide memorable experiences to enable talented person to gain an understanding of Japan and become a bridge between their home countries and Japan. Since this is an industry in which connections can grow into business opportunities, we participated in this program out of a belief that getting people involved in an internship to remember the Oshin name could be a step to seizing these opportunities.

The key to engaging in activities in Morocco and Japan, two countries that are geographically remote from one another, is to come up with online management ideas revolving around the elements of time and communications.

Q.What kind of internship did you run? What difficulties did you face and how did you resolve them?

For this program, we tasked Hiba, our intern, with carrying out market research in the GCC countries. We asked her to produce a list of potential clients and research Japanese tourism destinations and the use of social networking services for promotional purposes. While we asked her to use the Internet for this task, we realized that proceeding simply with the use of a search engine would make information's accuracy less. Thus, we gave her advice on how she might clarify her targets and devise better search terms, and conceived of an efficient research approach. Even while operating in an online environment, we believe that the intern was able to get a sense of the atmosphere of our company through lectures on basic knowledge pertaining to the travel industry and marketing and interactions with employees who possess a wealth of knowledge on the travel industry.
In addition, since the time difference between Morocco and Japan is eight hours, we needed to devise ways to communicate closely. Since Hiba was participating in this internship while working, we divided her activities into two time slots and adopted a flexible working style for her benefit. With the afternoon in Japan (morning in Morocco) treated as a core time slot, we communicated with her to get updates on her progress in terms of the completion of her tasks through online meetings and allowed her to carry out her tasks on her own in the afternoon for her in Morocco (nighttime in Japan).

We not only get the deliverables but also get the preparation opportunity for establishing an acceptance system about future recruitment.

Q.Comparing before and after the internship, what effects did it have on you, your employees, or your organization?

That we were able to clarify uncertain points of information with solid information obtained through searches conducted in the local language was a significant accomplishment. We believe that this information can be used to determine the optimal timing for promotions and content for tours. While much time and effort were involved in the production of a list of potential clients, it was produced with a level of accuracy high enough to enable action to be taken right away based on this list. In addition, the period between the time the acceptance was finalized and the time the intern was to begin her activities was a good opportunity to compile and prepare materials related to the company and the industry. With a start-up enterprise with a small workforce like this company, it is not easy to develop a system of acceptance when hiring not just overseas person but anyone in general. We believe that this document can be used as a basis for developing a system of acceptance that can be used the next time this company hires someone.
While we had already been confident in our ability to interact with overseas person, the exchanging of opinions with other companies during training sessions held by Japan internship Program Office in which we participated during the program, along with our conversations with instructors, opened our eyes to new insights. This allowed us to try to figure out how we should instruct our intern with a rejuvenated mindset, and were highly meaningful insofar as they could be applied to the way we communicated with Hiba.