Message from the President September.2018

The Cabinet Office published the Japan Revitalization Strategy 2016: Toward the 4th Industrial Revolution in 2016. According to this report, a new course of study including compulsory education on programming will begin in fiscal 2020 for elementary schools, in fiscal 2021 for junior high schools and in fiscal 2022 for senior high schools. Teachers, personnel in educational institutions and private companies considering providing indirect extracurricular support are working rapidly to establish a new education system on programming.

Set to begin in fiscal 2020, programming education at elementary schools has a principal objective of developing a programming-oriented mindset. This does not mean that education is intended to urge pupils to learn programming languages or skills. I understand that it is aimed at training them to resolve problems by means of logical thinking and creativity at an early stage.

In the society of the future, most routine work will be done by artificial intelligence and robots instead of humans, as the fourth industrial revolution makes progress. An even higher level of productivity will ultimately be demanded. I think that programming education will be introduced as training young people, who will in the future play a central part in this society, to be able to work in creative fields and to exhibit high performance after recognizing their roles.

I hope that this will lead to a steady increase in the those who have an interest in the profession of engineering, which creates something that still does not exist in the world, and in turn the pool of potential engineers.

These days, there is one thing that stays in my mind in connection with the logical thinking and creativity mentioned above. As technologies advance, many different work support tools are emerging, aiming at enhancing convenience. This is not confined to the world of engineers. Take the 3D CAD for example. It helps visualize the products and components to be designed, even when we cannot picture them in our own minds. If we are content with the convenience of tools that help you reach the finish without thinking or creation, machines will take over from humans. It is vital that we develop our capacity to think and create so that we can overcome key issues and challenges and achieve our final goals.

In this ever more convenient society, I hope that all of you at Meitec will focus on developing your own skills, with a spirit of competitiveness and independence, so that your essential career skills are not lost and you are not supplanted by the next generation of workers with programming-oriented mindsets.