Use of internship to deepen understanding of overseas markets in anticipation of future overseas expansion

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

Our purposes were promotion of overseas market research and to gain experience in accepting talent from overseas. Our company operates platforms to match people seeking side jobs with companies. While our services have been adopted by 1,000 companies and used by 50,000 people in Japan, we are also considering expanding our business to overseas. However, our company does not have specialists familiar with overseas markets and trends, and thus we accepted an intern to deepen our understanding of overseas markets. In addition, although we are considering accepting workers from overseas in the future, we felt that employing a foreign national as a full-time worker from the start would be a great risk as we had no experience with foreign nationals. Therefore, we were very grateful for the opportunity to accept talent from overseas on a trial basis as a student intern.

The intern was able to access the latest research papers written in English, to which we had not had access before, and worked on development of new services.

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

Roughly speaking, there were three kinds of activities ? research on overseas operations, summarization of research papers written in English and planning of overseas operations.
For research, we asked the intern to conduct mainly competitive analysis from an overseas perspective. Since he had a sense of his own about famous and successful companies, his research was very helpful as a reference for business planning. Summarization of papers written in English was conducted together with an AI engineer working for our company which made it possible for us to access the latest information. Concerning planning of overseas operations, the intern actually developed services together with our CTO. He contributed to promotion of our business by working together on planning and implementation of operations for attracting registered clients.

Through the acceptance of the intern, our employees became more positive about accepting talent from overseas and their global awareness increased.

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

We have become able to feel very positively about accepting talent from overseas on a mid- and long-term basis. We were a little worried about communications and cultural differences before, but now I feel that we were worrying over nothing. Instead, acceptance of the intern had the positive effect of fostering global awareness among our employees. I recommend companies that are considering employing workers from overseas even a little to start from accepting internships.