Creating an opportunity to gain international perspectives as we expand our overseas sales channels.

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

We are a manufacturer that develops, manufactures, and sells gear components for machine elements. Gear Reducers are widely used in robots and industry equipments. To meet the expected global demands for gear reducers, we are working to expand our sales channels overseas. In particular, India is a market that is expected to grow given the country’s commitment to stimulating the manufacturing sector. For this reason, we have been carrying out an internal project targeting India since 2019.
While we are currently proactively endeavoring to participate in exhibitions in India and online, we came to learn about this program when we felt that it would be nice to strengthen our ability to gather information for the expansion of our sales channels. On that note, we hoped that we could get interns to research the high-quality information required to expand our sales channels overseas. Thus communicating in English is forthcoming challenges, we once again participated in this program as last year in order to raise our level of first-hand experience in getting work and tasks done.

Frequent communication and feedback through daily meetings led this program to success.

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

This time, we provided technical training in the first half of the program and conducted market research in the second half. With respect to the technical training, we made product plans and designed 3D models for the purpose of understanding products and the design process at Japanese companies. We had our interns make and present their own ideas, construct 3D models on their own, and discuss ideas on a daily basis. With respect to the market research that was conducted in the second half of the program, we took advantage of the fact that our interns came from different cities to quantify differences among Indian cities in different regions, and aimed to make a list of companies that could be treated as potential clients in each city. Since marketing was not our interns' major, we were mindful of the need to specifically define our objectives and intentions and frequently interacted with them to ensure that effective research was conducted. Specifically, we believe that we were able to correct gaps in understanding by holding online meetings at the beginning and conclusion of each day's activities and by repeatedly communicating with one another.
At the end of the week, we offered Japanese-language lessons, introduced aspects of daily life in Japan, and came up with ideas to foster interest in Japan. We believe that making time to engage in activities other than the assigned tasks helped to improve our relationship with our interns.

We made time to get accustomed with English and Japanese for employees and our intern respectively. Through the efforts of mutual understanding each other, exerience of building trust and accepting different cultures was deepend.

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

We had our interns engage in simulated experiences related to development and design and sought to convey the appeal of our company to our interns. This is because we believed we could also build personal networks by getting not just our interns but also other exceptional students in India to hear about our company through interns. We were also able to sort out and verify information on areas in India where growth is expected.
As for the impact on our company, we managed to improve our communication skills through online meetings with our interns. We learned to be flexible in dealing with the difficulties in terms of oral comprehension that are associated with the unique Indian English accent and/or the technical issues of network. We also made time to allow our employees to give presentations on products in English to our interns and receive feedback from them. We were able to help our employees improve their English-language proficiency and overcome their sense that they were poor at interacting with foreigners, and also help our interns better understand our products at the same time. The provision of daily work instructions and guidance that led to the use of translation tools to ensure smooth communications and our daily exposure to Indian English helped to improve our practical communication skills.

※Masks removed only for photography.