AOTS Journal 2018 SPRING No.12 (ENGLISH)

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JOURNAL6Introducing AMEICC Endowed Courses in UniversitiesIntroductionAOTS has been implementing HRD programs for AMEICC as a part of the Japanese government’s scal 2015 supple-mentary budget program since 2016. This issue of Journal introduces AOTS’s ‘Endowed Courses’ for universities in ASEAN countries, where students are exposed to Japanese technologies of monodzukuri as well as corporate culture with the cooperation of Japanese business organizations and others. The endowed courses, as another type of HRD by AOTS, are designed for university students before gradu-ating, while the mainstay of AOTS HRD programs is meant for those engineers and administrators actually working for indigenous corporations, etc..What is AMEICC?AMEICC stands for ASEAN Economic Ministerial Meeting - Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry of Japan (METI) Economic and Industrial Cooperation Committee; this committee functions as a liaison with government ofcials of respective countries of ASEAN as Japan wishes to help them with economic and industrial progress as ASEAN. Founded in 1998, the secretariat is based at the Bangkok Ofce of AOTS.What is the purpose of endowed courses at universities?To nurture more capable personnel wanted by expatriate Japanese corporations through such measures as lecturing at universities using a new type of curriculum, an internship at local businesses or expatriate Japanese corporation or job fairs where expatriate Japanese corporations exhibit. It is also intended to facilitate overall business activities and economic progress as well as deepen the Japan-ASEAN cooperative relationship.What are the contents and methods?As of December 2017, the endowed courses are organized at 25 universities in six ASEAN nations: Indonesia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. With coor-dination with respective universities and consideration being given to the needs of respective expatriate Japanese corporations as providers of the courses, the scope of the courses are varied, ranging from Japanese way of monodzukuri and autonomation, electronics engineering, software development, Japanese corpo-rate culture, Kaizen, food safety, steel structure design, to safety control in civil engineering and architecture. AOTS’s endowed courses are carefully coordinated with respective local universities to avoid any overlapping of schooling time with regular classes; as such, the courses are held in the afternoon or evening after regular classes as well as school vacation. Local universities are responsible for enrolling students onto the courses after the screening, and those students are really excellent. The faculty consists of active engineers and executives at expatriate Japanese corporations as well as dispatched profes-sionals from Japan.Yoshinoya Holdings Co., Ltd offered its endowed course on ‘marketing and food safety’ at the school of liberal arts at Thammasat University. It was intended to provide students at one of the most famous universities of Thailand with that critical knowhow on market exploration, sales strategy and knowledge on safety and hygiene while make them acquire more practical experience by an internship and the course started. The rst batch of 21 students, after nishing classroom sessions at Thamassat University, went out of the campus in June 2017, to visit food-related businesses and they experienced customer service at one of the actual Yoshinoya shops in Bangkok. Then six out of 21 students were selected to visit Japan for an internship in July. They took part in a two-week internship in Japan with an inten-sive schedule including visiting farms for foodstuff cultivation, plant for food processing, a restaurant business in Japan, hands-on practice at the actual shop and nally they presented their reports of accomplishment. All those six selected students, all female, impressed the Japanese side with their reporting, featuring shining smiles and pride. The dean of the school of liberal arts of Thamassat University, who came to see them in Japan, seemed to be satised with their presentation. OJT at one of the Yoshinoya Restaurants in TokyoHands-on Exercise in out of townExample of an endowed course at school of liberal arts at Thammasat University Thailand