Cshool seminar for foreigners!

Hello everyone !
The rainy season is striking Tokyo but we hope that you’re all feeling well !
At Cshool meanwhile, we held a seminar in partnership with Coto Work in Iidabashi.

Coto Work is a recruitment company specialize in services catered toward foreigners, Coto Work’s sister company is Coto Language Academy where you can learn japanese at your own pace with their many different courses.
Coto Work website

Actually Elizabeth (from Paris, France), who was the main lecturer at the seminar was a candidate that Coto Work introduced to Cshool.


Matsumura (Cshool’s CEO) started by introducing his company and services, then Elizabeth proceeded to do the same for the guests present for that seminar, the guest were Ueda-san and Enokido-san from the design strategy department of the company DeNA.

After the introduction we went onto the presentation that was about the Web industry in Japan.
The first topic was about the japanese work style. From a foreign point of view, Japan has a very strict work style image with long hours. But like it was explained during the seminar, in the web industry it can be a bit different (as it is for Cshool and DeNA) and also with the globalization, habits are gradually changing.

Cshool for example tries to avoid overtime work as much as possible, and DeNA has a free work style where each employee manage their time as they want and can also work from home even. Of course not all companies has the same way of working but in the web industry it is known to be a bit more relax.

The second topic was about the interview process.
It was said that the most important aspect in an interview was to have a portfolio to present to the company. At DeNA for example the portfolio is thoroughly reviewed and judged.
The difference about production and services companies have also been explained during that part.

Next up was the different tools used by front-end and web designers, things to know and the use of japanese fonts (Gothic and Minchou type that are similar to the serif and sans-serif ones), it was also introduced to the attendees some useful websites to learn some basic coding skills.

We also introduce a showcase website that gather different style of website with pretty design or cool functionalities, we talked a bit about some japanese websites which have for example the particular vertical reading from top to bottom.

Then we talked about few job searching website specialized in the web industry.

The presentation ended but we moved forward to the Q&A part of the seminar, we divided the attendees in 3 groups and each group had one of the lecturer and/or guests to answer more specific questions.

We also wanted to know what was everyone’s objectives for the future, what skill they were maybe interesting in learning and also why they wanted to work or were interested in finding jobs in the web industry.

People coming from different countries as far as Iran, USA, China or Australia etc. attended this seminar.
Nowadays Japan is lacking skilled workers so we think that with time, Japan will seek more and more skills from other countries.
So it is a good opportunity for foreigners to learn some new skills and to do their best!
Let’s all do our best from now on !