Helping Students Grow and Achieve Their Dreams with the Multifaceted Support of the Panasonic Scholarship Asia

We wanted to provide financial support to help talented students become assets who will be well-prepared to join the workforce. We knew that a number of students already had access to environments where they could learn a lot to achieve their dreams,
but many students felt that the basic knowledge they gained in school was insufficient when they entered the workforce. Under those circumstances, students wouldn’t be able to make the most of the knowledge they’ve learned, and the realization of their dreams could be delayed. And so, we wondered if there may have been some elements that were lacking in the traditional support they were receiving. To that end, our office exchanged various thoughts and opinions internally on how we could offer a new form of support to students.

As a result, we organized a training program to teach students basic business philosophy and other skills, with the goal of helping them smoothly transition into and play an active role in their jobs as work-ready assets when they join the workforce.
The main contents of the training program are as follows:

• Basic Business Philosophy and Basic Business Manners
• Communication Skills and Horenso (a Japanese workplace acronym that stands for “report, contact, and consult”)
• Problem-Solving Skills
• Presentation Skills
• CV Creation and How to Have an Effective Interview

The training program has been more popular with students than we could have imagined, and the number of participants has been growing each year.

This training program – a new form of support that our office devised – started in 2017.

Something that’s needed when entering the workforce is “soft skills.” From the perspective of companies, this is obvious and clear. So, we focused on that and organized a training program that would allow students to acquire soft skills from Panasonic’s viewpoint. We came up with the idea to actively convey basic knowledge that may be common in the corporate world but is still unfamiliar to students.

At first, the training program mainly consisted of basic courses such as Basic Business Philosophy. These courses covered topics such as Basic Business Manners, Time Management Skills, Communication Skills, and Presentation Skills.
In the beginning, only around 40 students participated in the training program. Our goal was to make the training program one that more students would want to attend. So, we felt that it was necessary to continue evolving and transforming our program.

We continuously listened to feedback from students who experienced the training program, sought out advice and opinions from people already in the workforce, and heard about the kinds of information and knowledge that they wished to understand at a deeper level. With each round of feedback, we customized the topics covered in the training program, which greatly improved the accuracy of the program.

Since the training program’s inception in 2017, we have also held a course to teach students the philosophy of our founder, Konosuke Matsushita. The text we use is unique to the training program and was edited by us. Some students who attended the training program said they didn’t know much about Panasonic before, but they were able to gain a deeper understanding of the company and the significance of startups through this experience. Many students also seemed to reflect on where they currently stood in relation to their everyday lives, their attitudes toward studying, and other areas.
In 2023, the Japan office took the lead in organizing philosophy-focused training sessions in various countries, but we had been conducting our training program long before that. I believe that our activities have been a great inspiration to the offices in other countries.

Here are some impressions from students who attended our training program:

“I’m grateful to the Panasonic training program for giving me more knowledge and skills to apply to my life and work in the future. I will try to absorb and apply them effectively in my daily work and future job.”

“This will be good preparation for me to enter the Vietnamese labor market. I will also pass on this useful knowledge to others around me and in my learning community.”

“I was able to edit my CV more effectively and avoided making small mistakes that are easy to make. I’m also better at preparing for interviews now.”

“Before I joined, I thought they were just like all the other courses I had previously participated in. But once I took one of the courses, I was surprised by all the knowledge I gained, which was unlike anything I had experienced before. Not only that, but the lessons were also practical stories from the instructors’ experiences, which they enthusiastically passed on to the next generation.”

The stories of the students who attended the training program spread among students, and now, seven years after its start, the number of students who wish to attend the training program has surged, and it has grown into a popular training program that has around 300 people in attendance.

Of course, we will continue to evolve our training program. It is our hope that the training program will continue to be useful and practical for Vietnamese students.

In addition to the example of Vietnam we’ve shared here, there are other instances of supporting students through uniquely planned training and events. However, you could say that a significant feature of this initiative is how the Vietnam office takes students’ thoughts and goals and continuously implements appropriate measures. Above all, the Vietnam office has been engaged in active communication with students. As a result, we believe this has led to success in bridging the gap between students and companies/businesses. In the future, this approach may be implemented in other countries.