テッコウギョウ ノ コウド セイチョウ オ カノウ ト サセタ ヤワタ セイテツショ ノ イチダイ キョウイク プロジェクト 3 1957 1966 ネン ノ ジュウギョウイン キョウイク プロセス ソ ヨンダル キョウジュ タイニン キネンゴウ

In my previous articles－“The Development of a Large-scale Employee Education Program at Yawata Iron and Steel Works and Its Influence on Japan\u27s Rapid Economic Development” (1)and (2) in St. Andrew\u27s University Economic and Business Review, Vol.42 No.2 November 2000 and No.2 Vol.43 November 2001－I wrote in (1) about the overall aspect of a mass education and of the use of “Foremen“, and in (2) about the education for a total of 40,000 workers from the year from 1957 to 1969. In the decade of the 1960s, Japanese Steel Industry constructed six brand-new gigantic steel works, with huge facilities equipped with electro-mechanical equipment. Because of the massive size of each facility and the computerized production control system integrating the whole works, even a short out-of-service time of equipment damaged total productivity heavily on one hand, while on the other, the technology necessary to properly maintain and repair this equipment required high-level knowledge and skills in state-of-the art electronics and modernized engineering. However, the most of the maintenance workers in 1950s had only 6-8 years of basic education with experience-related skills. As I described in my previous article (2), many of them recieved another 4 years of equivalent education through in-house education programs. In order to fill up the gap between the technological level required and the level of the workers, Yawata Works initiated its own technological courses within the frame work of the Works’ “Education Program”. In the courses, starting from 1960, new employees who had just graduated from high school were trained full-time for one and a half years to acquire the equivalent of an undergraduate education in the specialized field of electronics, automation and instrumentation, and mechanical engineering. It ended in 1965 and nearly 690 graduated. In addition to these courses, Yawata started the compacted version of the courses and educated already employed maintenance workers in intensive three month full-time courses to give them a junior technical college level education. It started from 1960 and ended in 1965 and nearly 1,600 employees finished the courses. These persons became key figures in the existing as well as newly constructed steel works to sustain the full operation of the new facilities. Judging from the number of published papers on this topic, which I could find almost none, the importance of these in-house-education has not been properly recognized, even though it was indispensable for Japanese rapid economic development. From this point of view, this article describes the detailed curriculum and the way the courses were designed and proceeded as part of a large-scale employee education system