From the viewpoint of securing diverse human resources to execute management and business strategies, we continue to focus on hiring mid-careers. As a sustainability indicator in the 2025 Merium-term Plan, we have set a target of maintaining the ratio of mid-career hires in total new hires (management, career-track, and clerical positions) at around 30%. We are working to strengthen and improve our hiring ability to achieve our goals. Specifically, we are striving to strengthen our recruitment team, expand our recruitment channels (considering referral recruitment and alumni networking), review our recruitment process, improve and enhance our onboarding program, and build a flexible personnel treatment plan.

In addition to changes in the hiring environment, students’ attitudes toward employment are also changing. The talent competition is becoming more intense. As part of our efforts to make our company more appealing to students, we have revamped our recruitment media (company brochures, graduate recruitment website, and expanded use of SNS). Furthermore, we have introduced a “course-based hiring” system which limits to some extent the jobs available at the time of initial assignment. Limiting the types of jobs to which we assign new hires serves to enhance the clarity of their career paths. We do this to make it easier for employees to have an image of their individual growth and promote the acquisition of talented individuals with diverse sets of ideas.

To develop management personnel and candidates for general manager positions in each organization, we formulate succession plans and development plans.

Regarding management personnel, we are building a pool of candidates by utilizing external assessments, providing external training programs, and promoting well-planned transfers, including tough assignments, based on development plans. In addition, the Nominating/Compensation Committee monitors the appropriateness and operational status of the management personnel development system and works methodically over multiple years on the appointment of executive officers and succession plans for the CEO.

With regard to succession planning for general manager-level positions, we have continued implementing the plans and development programs formulated across all organizations in FY2023. For manager-level positions, we have developed succession plans through discussions between each organization and the HR division, with a focus on building a pipeline of future general manager candidates. In FY2025, we will formulate and implement development plans based on these succession plans.

In Furukawa Electric Group, we have established the “Furukawa Electric Group People Vision” as the ideal state of people and organization toward achieving the “Furukawa Electric Group Purpose.” We define the talent necessary for executing our business strategies as “individuals capable of driving transformation toward value creation and business development rooted in solving social issues, by leveraging the technological expertise and proposal capabilities that our Group has continuously and sincerely refined.” To foster such talent, we provide various training and educational programs to enhance the capability development and growth of each employee.

We started our Global Business Leader (GBL) training in FY2006, and in FY2013, this was reformed into the Global Mindset Program (GMP), with an extra emphasis being placed on global human resource education. We have also operated a Global Development Program (GDP) for overseas local employees since FY2010 with the aim of strengthening links within Furukawa Electric Group, with the curriculum being partly shared with the GMP. Furthermore, in FY2014, we launched the Global Challenge Program (GCP). This program involves the dispatch of younger employees to foreign countries for certain periods of time, allowing us to secure diverse talent and provide opportunities for growth.

We provide training for creating organizations where human resources are developed for all workplaces that accept new employees. This is because we believe that in order to create an organization that can achieve results as a team, it is essential to improve the overall development capabilities of the workplace. For this reason, the training is not only for supervisors, but also for other members of the workplace. Generally speaking, when we talk about OJT training, we think of cases where the supervisor and section manager are busy providing guidance and follow-up to new employees with the aim of making them into effective members of the workforce. However, our OJT support does not involve supervisors or mentors, but rather appoints an OJT leader to act as an arranger, and the aim is to create an educational system as an organization by having the OJT leader involve all team members in discussions. In addition, we provide opportunities to go through the OJT PDCA cycle over the course of a year in order to build up an educational system as an organization. In the OJT PDCA cycle, we hold four training sessions a year to impart skills and share concerns and best practices among OJT leaders.

At our Group, we identified gaps between the abilities and skills required for both company and individual growth in order to realize our business strategies, and engaged in discussions with senior management and each organizational unit to develop mechanisms for acquiring those capabilities and skills. As a result, we defined reskilling as “voluntary learning of knowledge and skills necessary for executing work, whether those are new or existing.”

Specifically, to support the process of individual skill acquisition and development, we changed the learning environment in which “some individuals learn a uniform set of skills at a predetermined timing, frequency, and location" to "individuals can learn a wide variety of skills anytime, anywhere, and as often as they want." Based on the above, we introduced a new e-learning system across the Company in FY2024. As a result, we have created an environment where individuals are free to learn a wide variety of skills at their own pace. Furthermore, we are enhancing support for self-directed learning by integrating this system with existing training curricula (by level, department, and project) and creating opportunities for cross-organizational and cross-functional learning, enabling employees to learn from one another beyond the boundaries of their own teams.

The Career Support Office was established in FY2021. With this office, we are making efforts to support employees’ self-directed career development in tandem with existing personnel systems, including career design training provided for each age group and class, seminars to help employees develop their careers, and individual career-related consultation meetings.

Since FY2021, we have been operating an in-house secondary job system. This system allows employees to voluntarily participate in projects of interest, using up to 20% of their workload, fostering personal growth, fulfillment, and career development. Since the system's inception, a total of 72 projects and 170 employees have participated. In FY2024 alone, 24 projects with 58 participants were recorded. This initiative has enhanced participants' motivation while providing positive stimulation and impact to both the receiving and sending departments.

To accelerate self-directed career development, we piloted an internal open recruitment system in FY2023 and fully implemented it in FY2024. This system enables employees to voluntarily apply for job transfers. In FY2024 alone, there were 82 internal job openings, with 34 applicants and 13 successful matches (compared to FY2023 alone: 57 internal job openings, 34 applicants, and 10 successful matches). Alongside the in-house secondary job system, this initiative supports career autonomy, positively impacting both individuals and the organization. We will continue to promote and enhance these efforts going forward.