Workforce

It is not a secret that our world is constantly changing, business strategies are continually developing, and technologies are evolving. So how can your employees keep up with all new knowledge and skills? Here are the ways a few big businesses are doing that:

School for employees at DBS bank 

DBS Bank, a multinational company with headquarters in Singapore, ensures that all 26,000 employees are encouraged to keep learning, no matter their age or seniority. 

How diverse is your workplace? And how inclusive is it? While many organizations may feel prepared to answer the first question, the second often causes a bit of confusion. Isn’t it just the same question rephrased?

Rita Mitjans, ADP’s chief diversity and social responsibility officer, explains.

Goldman Sachs has instituted a new diversity program based not on quotas but on hard data trends that uncovered why even progressive recruitment out of college hasn’t solved the problem. Women and minorities, it turned out, even when hired at the same rates as their white male counterparts, kept falling out of the pipeline. Attrition was enormous.

Japan's Cabinet has approved a draft bill that would allow the entry of more foreign blue-collar workers as the country's rapidly aging population faces labor shortages.

The bill is a major revision of Japan's policy on foreign labor. The country has long resisted accepting foreign workers, except for doctors, teachers and others in highly skilled fields. The proposed legislation would create two new visa categories for foreigners employed in more than a dozen sectors facing labor shortages, such as nursing, farming, construction and services.

The number of asylum seekers to Japan grew 80 percent to a record 19,628 in 2017--but only 20 were accepted.

Immigration is a controversial subject in Japan, even as the population ages and its workforce shrinks. The government in mid-January 2018 limited the right to work only to those Japan regards as bona fide refugees. As a result, the average daily number of applicants for asylum fell by 50 percent in January as compared to December 2017.

Japan’s biggest banks are racing to adapt to changing business conditions amid the shrinking population and spread of online banking.

Many have laid out plans to downsize their workforce and massive network of branches while investing in “fintech”—technological innovation in the financial sector—to streamline their operations and make banking more convenient for their customers.

Mitsubishi UFJ plans to trim 6,000 jobs from the unit’s domestic workforce of 40,000 by the end of fiscal year 2023.

On one of the busiest online shopping days of the year, Black Friday, thousands of Amazon employees decided it was also a good day to walk off the job. Warehouse workers in several distribution centers in Germany and Italy took the day off to demand higher wages and better treatment. ​

In a global study of IT security architecture, IT practitioners from Japan (79%) and Canada (74%) are the most concerned about millennials in the workplace posing a significant risk to security.

As the world’s first “connected” generation, millennials are hyperactive on their mobile devices, using apps and social media platforms for both personal and professional purposes. 

China’s Huawei technologies, the world’s third largest smartphone maker after Apple and Samsung, has announced plans to build new R&D facilities in Chiba, Japan.

This news shows the general trend of Chinese corporations becoming multinationals, but what struck Japanese people is not this news, but other news that Huawei Japan is offering the starting monthly salary of 400,000 Japanese yen.

A startup in South Korea is making headlines for only hiring staff that are aged 55 years and over.

The founder of content monitoring company EverYoung established the rule to prove the futility of age discrimination – a phenomenon that's reportedly prevalent in modern Korean corporate culture.

Employees at EverYoung monitor blog content on Korean web portal Naver and detect sensitive information on Naver Maps, as well as perform other IT tasks, including running coding classes for school students.

In 2030, there will be more jobs than workers able to fill them in many of the world's largest economies, according to Boston Consulting Group senior partner Rainer Strack.