The Background
For any business travel, employees need to prepare—especially for an extended international trip.
When Toyota Motor North America Research & Development needed to send a group of employees from the Ann Arbor and York, Michigan offices to the Japanese headquarters for long-term assignments, they wanted their engineers to be ready.
Stefan Young, Vice President of Vehicle and Mobility Engineering, wanted his team to have a level of comfort with the language and culture so they could better communicate and navigate Toyota City.
That’s when he contacted Dr. Hitomi Oketani, a professor of Japanese in the Department of World Languages at Eastern Michigan University (EMU). Professor Oketani has been teaching Japanese for almost 30 years.
While Toyota Motor North America provides Japanese tutoring for those leaving on foreign assignments, Young felt that he wanted to give his team a stronger foundation in language to get them up to speed as quickly as possible. Young had sent individual engineers to EMU for credit classes in the past, but since there was such a large group of engineers traveling, he wanted to help them start off on the right foot in an accelerated way.
Our Solution
When working with Professor Oketani and EMU’s Professional Programs & Training, they were able to create a non-credit customized training course that worked best for their needs.
“I think we had 11 people that were leaving, and if we had gone through all the work of signing them up for college and sending them to courses…it would be at night, it’d be at an inconvenient time, it might not fit with their business needs,” said Young. “And also, we wanted to give them more education in a shorter amount of time. So by working with PPAT and the Japanese section at EMU, we’re able to set the time of when we wanted them to have classes that fit both our business schedule and their personal needs.”
In the end, the course was similar to a 100-level Japanese course so the team could communicate in Japanese at the basic level, with the addition of business language and culture. To meet their timeframe, classes were held 3 times a week for an hour and a half.
The Results
For Young and his team at Toyota, there were numerous benefits to working with the Japanese Section of EMU and PPAT.
“I was actually in Japan not too long ago, and I went out to dinner with all of them,” said Young. “And they all did the ordering, they could communicate in Japanese. I was listening to them speak, and I was really proud of them and happy for where we had gotten in a short amount of time.”
And the benefits don’t just stop at learning the language. Taking this beginner Japanese course helped his team feel more comfortable not just in the work environment, but outside of work too.
“They can easily ask, ‘How do I get to the train station? What time is the train? Where’s a good restaurant?’” said Young. “So they can navigate their life a little bit better. It’s kind of scary to live in a foreign country, and I think any advantage we can give them for that initial start can really set them up on the right foot.”
The first pilot program for Toyota’s Japanese training happened in January 2024. After the first training, they modified the program to include more business and engineering-centric words and culture for the second training that started in September 2024.
“After the first program, we did a questionnaire that they were able to use to make the second training even better,” said Professor Oketani.
Based on the questionnaire, Professor Oketani and her team adjusted the course to meet Toyota’s needs. This included more vocabulary written in katakana. Katakana is one of the types of Japanese characters that is often used in the engineering field.
For Young, the goal was to make this whole process easier than it had been in the past, and the customized beginner Japanese program achieved just that.
“If you have them all go their own way or have to apply to college and do all the paperwork and figure out how we do the payments or all these things, it just makes it harder,” he said. “And we want everyone to be engaged. We want everyone to be able to be part of this learning. So for other organizations considering this idea, something I’d say is that it makes it easy for the team. There’s one payment I took care of, and it was super helpful to make that easy to do. Hitomi gave us a bunch of options and we picked a time that met our business needs best…and making it easy for the team makes it more achievable for us to get to our goals.”
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