Introduction

Nice to meet you. My name is Kumagai, and I’m in charge of the Engineering Education Training Project at KINTO Technologies. I enjoy traveling both in Japan and abroad, and recently I've taken a particular interest in visiting airports across the country. There are many appealing airports, such as New Chitose Airport with its excellent dining options, and Naha Airport, where the deep blue sea stretches out right before your eyes. My personal favorite, however, is Toyama Airport. It's not quite as close to the city center as Fukuoka Airport, but it's still very convenient. Most of all, the sushi restaurant inside the airport is absolutely delicious. If you’re traveling in the Hokuriku region, I highly recommend stopping by.

Today, I’d like to give you a brief overview of what our team, the Engineering Education Training Project, usually does.

How the Project Started

We are a newly formed team that officially began full-scale operations in August 2022. KINTO Technologies has been actively expanding its hiring efforts, and our organization has grown to nearly 300 members, including engineers, designers, and QA engineers.

However, because of the rapid growth over the past year or two, we’ve reached this point without having much discussion around key topics, such as which programming languages we’ll focus on moving forward and what skills will be expected, or what kind career paths we hope to offer.

To address this, we launched the project with the goal of reorganizing the skills our engineers currently have and building a system where they can access training whenever they want to learn something new. At the same time, we’re also working to improve the organizational issues that cause frustration or uncertainty among engineers, with the aim of increasing retention.

Self-Driven Engineers

Our mission is to continuously think about how we can support engineers who work independently, and to put those ideas into action.

What the Group Is Currently Working On

Education

As part of our training efforts, we were able to offer a session on the Toyota Production System (TPS). Personally, since I had the opportunity to join a Toyota group company, I had always wanted to learn more about TPS, the foundation of lean development practices. At the time, the company had no such training program, so we arranged for Toyota Motor Corporation to hold two TPS sessions, drawing participation from over 50 people. By creating flow diagrams of goods and information, known as "monojou," participants were able to visualize sources of waste and factors that block efficiency. This has proven useful in our daily work at KINTO.

In the Global Development Group, many engineers have expressed frustration with the siloed structure within the company. Others have said that study sessions become dull if they are purely lecture-based. In response, we decided to support a new initiative called Innovation Day.

KINTO Technologies has also fully adopted public cloud platforms such as AWS (Amazon Web Services) and GCP (Google Cloud Platform), and we’ve been deepening our collaboration with the people who support us within these platforms. We regularly invite support engineers to lead study sessions, and together with the teams from AWS and GCP, we’re working to promote and energize the use of public cloud.

Organizational Development

In an employee survey, many people expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of information sharing within the company. At KINTO Technologies, we held a company-wide meeting once a month, but it often consisted of one-way communication. We felt it wasn’t functioning as a place for mutual information sharing. To address this, we reviewed how the meeting is run. In addition to setting aside time for the Director General to share development and business updates, we now livestream introductions to newly opened offices and keep chat channels open to accept questions in real time. As a result, we’ve received a lot of positive feedback, such as “I have a better understanding of what’s going on in the company” and “Communication has become more open.” We’re still in the middle of making improvements, but we’ll continue working to create an open environment that enables two-way communication.

We also welcome many mid-career hires each month. However, we’ve heard that it can be hard for them to approach managers outside their own group because they don’t have opportunities to interact. To improve this, we encourage communication with managers and leaders from other groups during the OJT period, recommending that they engage in “build-up”, a soccer term that refers to building connections. We hope this will lead to more active communication across different divisions of the organization.

Group Members

At present, we are a small team of two. In addition to myself, we have a member who joined from a recruitment agency. Leveraging their sales expertise, we actively propose ideas within the company, such as sponsoring conferences and introducing tools to measure productivity. The introduction of one such productivity tool even led to invitations to speak at online events. These kinds of daily efforts continue to create new connections and help us expand the reach of our activities.

Our team also follows the Scrum methodology. We operate in two-week sprints, reviewing both planned tasks and achievements each cycle. Many of our initiatives span the long term, and such efforts often involve abstract discussions that can make concrete progress difficult at times. However, using Scrum allows us to set short-term checkpoints and commit to them, which helps us move forward with long-term initiatives in a more concrete and actionable way.

What I Want to Try Next

First of all, I want to clearly define and document the engineering skills we have. By doing so, I hope to make it easier to develop strategies that identify the types of talent we have at KINTO Technologies, highlight our strengths, and recognize areas where skills are lacking so we can address them through training.

We’re also considering introducing a system that allows us to conduct regular employee surveys. Organizational development doesn’t yield results overnight. I believe that by combining a variety of initiatives, we’ll gradually see a reduction in employee turnover. That’s why I’d like to conduct regular surveys and make ongoing improvements. If a certain initiative proves effective in a given month, we can refine it and apply it again moving forward.