Work culture - Japan Vs India

I had an opportunity to visit to Yawata plant of Nippon steel Japan.

We had interactions with senior management of their plant.  The senior managers of Yawata plant had visited us in India and they had seen our operation and way of functioning. They wanted to show us their way of inducting and grooming their technical person as they did not like our way of recruitment and grooming our technical persons.

In Yawata, they were taking industrial school pass young persons of 17years. The industrial school is one year course after schooling (some sort of our half ITI equivalent). The new recruits used to be  given  theoretical input for three months in  their respective  discipline then they were sent to plant for the job.

After work of 9 months in plant they are again given training (theoretical inputs) for 3months again sent to plant for job for another 9 months. A new industrial school pass undergoes 3 plus 9 months of theoretical inputs and job on site for 10 years.

We went through the course material of 9 months multiplied by 10 years and found it to be our diploma equivalent. The ten year course is divided in three tiers. We were told that there is examination and performance evaluation of these people every three year and only on passing these examination and evaluation people move to next tier.  There is provision of completion of course in 8to9 years also for good persons however some persons do take 12 years to complete the course.

So normally a person at the age of 27years he has both theoretical and practical knowledge to run the plant.  These people grow to a sufficiently high level (chief) in organization.

So there is fundamentally one difference with our system i.e they have got one cadre which is equivalent to ours workers, supervisors, and junior officers and   sufficiently senior officer.

Since there is no line drawn like worker/supervisor/officer, there is no hesitation (taboo) in working with own hand . They do not use phrases like blue collar job and white collar job, each company has got their uniform used by workers, officer, clerks on duty.

As there is no division of jobs among different cadre, the productivity is very high compared our system.

Since most of people have learnt engineering while working in plant, they develop better appreciation engineering and due to these they tend to be far more innovative as compared to our counterpart.