Toyoko Inn Co., Ltd. plans to conduct employee training utilizing Minecraft in January 2024.
The initiative aims to foster programming thinking while encouraging active communication among employees, with CA Tech Kids Inc., which manages programming education for children, supervising and operating the project.
Toyoko Inn Implements Employee Training Utilizing Minecraft
Toyoko Inn, a business hotel chain boasting the highest number of guest rooms in Japan, recognizes that acquiring and nurturing human resources is a crucial issue for the entire hotel industry in the face of a severe labor shortage.
To solve these challenges and launch digital training as a groundbreaking initiative within the hotel industry, the company will conduct employee training utilizing Minecraft in January 2024 as its first phase.
Training Content
In the training utilizing Minecraft, teams will tackle challenges such as planning and constructing a concept hotel set in a virtual space.
Employees will actively develop their capabilities while learning concept making, task management, teamwork, and management skills.
Furthermore, by incorporating programming elements into part of it, the goal is also to cultivate programming thinking such as decomposition and abstraction.
Through active communication among employees via Minecraft, the company also expects to discover talent that is difficult to see during regular operations.
The employee training will take place over a three-day period from Wednesday, January 10 to Friday, January 12, 2024, with 280 employees participating.
CA Tech Kids Inc., which operates a programming education business for children, participates in project supervision and operations.
CA Tech Kids has developed educational businesses utilizing technology from an early stage, such as conducting the first Minecraft-certified programming classes in Japan officially recognized by Microsoft Japan in 2017.
While programming schools utilizing Minecraft are increasing year by year in Japan, most of them target students.
However, since one of the great things about Minecraft is that it allows for free goal setting and finding flexible solutions, high expectations exist for its future utilization in employee training and icebreakers for new hires.
Comment from Toyoko Inn Co., Ltd. Representative Executive Officer and President Maiko Kuroda
When I was thinking that IT reskilling of our employees is essential both to become a company chosen by our employees and to solve the shortage of IT human resources, a certain newspaper article caught my eye.
It was an article about programming education in elementary schools, and I was shocked to learn that the assignment for sixth graders was creating an app to solve family troubles.
Wanting to know what it means to acquire problem-solving skills through programming education, I immediately visited an elementary school.
What impressed me there was the sight of elementary school students eagerly working on challenges as a team.
I became interested in CA Tech Kids, who created that program together with the elementary school, and this training became a reality.
I actually experienced it myself, and thanks to the CA Tech Kids staff being great at keeping the energy high, the long training flew by.
We were able to naturally divide team roles without being bound by hierarchical relationships, and while solving challenges while having fun, I was able to discover personalities and abilities that are hard to see in normal operations.
It is an unknown how our employees will learn and how it will be applied to their regular work, but I am very much looking forward to it.
(Translated from Japanese)
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