2014 Vol.2

What Firms Should Provide to Produce Successful，Globally Competitive Professionals

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If globally competitive professionals are those capable of fulfilling their duties and contributing to their organization regardless of the countries where they work, then such professionals can come from any country. However, due to circumstances surrounding today’s Japanese firms, both their Japanese headquarters and overseas subsidiaries have difficulty in hiring and retaining highly capable foreign workers. For this reason, in order to produce globally competitive professionals, a realistic option is for Japanese firms to dispatch employees from their headquarters to overseas posts and provide them with relevant training. To produce globally competitive professionals, firms must not only provide pre-departure training to the selected employees and then let them gain various experiences overseas, but also provide a foundation for a comfortable daily life so that they can work overseas without concern and achieve their maximum performance. More specifically, five measures that firms should take to build the foundation for the employees assigned to overseas posts are as follows: (1) clarifying corporate policies relevant to employees dispatched overseas, (2) creating compensation and benefit systems as well as safety and crisis management systems so that employees can work overseas without concern, (3) providing, before departure, necessary information and opportunities to learn from the experiences of others, (4) providing operational support from the Japanese headquarters, and (5) creating a system that appropriately evaluates the performance of the employees working overseas. Drawing on the author’s consulting experiences, this paper explains each of these five measures and outlines specific actions that firms should take.