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Accelerate Communications via A Study Session

We have an activity called study session which is created by me. It was made only around three months after I joined e-Jan. It was quite impressive because people were open to ideas even though it was from a new employee like me. I would like to explain more about the study session.

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Before I explain what the study session is, I would like to write about its background. I got a motivation to create study session from my team leader. Once every two weeks, my team leader and I will have a “one on one” meeting for an hour. In the meeting, the leader couches me to become better professional. He asked me what my dreams are when we had our first meeting. One of my dreams was to become senior-level developer. Next, he asked me what to do to achieve my dream. I said I need to read books, write code frequently, and have many discussions as well as communications. Everything else is fine, but a lack of communications is the problem. My leader gave me a homework that I need to start discussions somehow. To fulfill this mission, I created the study session. The study session is an activity to improve teamwork performance and quality of coding. Once a week, I gather my teammates, and then we will have discussion for 30 minutes. The topic can be anything related to software development. For example, we can have technical discussions on one day and social discussion such as agile development in another. Actually, sometimes it does not even have to be discussions. If someone wants to share some idea, he or she can do presentations to us.

I believe the study session has many positive impacts. Obviously, it has educational effects. We continuously learn something we are not familiar with because the range of topic is very wide. Moreover, we develop our interpersonal skill through active communications. Personally, it is good practice for me to organize a social activity. Also, we discuss about current issue we have and gather ideas to solve the issue together. In other words, it works as a retrospective session. Sometimes, we invite people outside of our team. If we decide to discuss on non-technical topic, then we may invite people from other department to hear opinions from different perspectives. By doing so, it stretches our knowledge. Overall, it is interesting to observe how we utilize the study session for various purpose.

In conclusion, the study session promotes communication and makes our working life more interesting. Although it starts from the homework, I really enjoy running this activity because it is for my dream and created from my idea. From the study session, I felt the importance of connection between personal interest and work. It amazingly motivates employee. I also realized people actually have many ideas in their mind, but they often do not express it. I believe life will be more interesting if people express their ideas more. Fortunately, e-Jan has many opportunities to share your idea, and they encourage people to do so.

-R.O. (moved to Japan in 2017, started working in 2017)