October of 2018, RareJob Philippines, Inc. celebrated its ten-year anniversary. Definitely an occasion to remember, RJPH employees, together with VIPs from their parent company RareJob, Inc., commemorated the milestone through thanksgiving feasts and merriment.

And why not?

Ten years of staying as one of Japan’s leading online ESL schools is no small feat; that said, all the partying was well-deserved.

A year later, October 8, 2019, RareJob Philippines, Inc. celebrated its eleventh founding anniversary. The high from reaching a decade has worn off, and yet one question resounded loudly:

What’s next?

Instead of the usual staff assembly where the main stars were scrumptious food and fun activities, we decided to organize a Career Talk with the theme RareJob PH @ 11: Innovation that inspires, which was commenced by words of inspiration from RareJob Inc.’s President, Gaku Nakamura, and RareJob Philippines, Inc.’s CEO, Shingo Inaba.

Opening Remarks by Shingo Inaba, Chief Executive Officer of RareJob Philippines, Inc.

‘Why a career talk about innovation?’, one might ask?

Reaching ten years wasn’t the end, nor was it the ultimate culmination of all the efforts of everyone from RareJob. After celebrating one of our most important milestones,  we still need to continuously grow and reinvent ourselves, introducing new ways or ideas to approach various points from different angles, with different solutions.  Reaching ten years in the ESL business is quite an achievement, but remaining relevant in the field for the years to come is another story. To achieve that, we need to have an outside-in mindset in this age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

We need to seek out external information to make well-informed business decisions. How will the social, technological, and political changes impact our organization and its stakeholders, the students and the tutors? Only through knowing these can we best move forward. As they say, information is power: knowing will allow us to form a mental map to guide us in innovating our services continuously.

Congratulatory Message by Gaku Nakamura, President of RareJob, Inc. Group

We are now in the age where technology paves the way for the rise of superjobs, as well as emphasizes the importance of the 21^st Century Skills. According to a Deloitte Study (Volini 2019), superjobs require a combination of traditional jobs, and the 21^st Century Skills, more familiarly known as soft skills, such as communication, collaboration, problem-solving and more. It means to say that the rise of the technology will bring more opportunities for humans to focus on creative tasks such as designing and planning. In this age, humans will finally be more human: people will have more time to explore and express their individuality, as artificial intelligence and machines focus on heavy routine tasks, such as encoding and data analysis.

This, however, poses a challenge  to routine jobs currently being occupied by the workforce. Hence, there is a need to rethink how we design jobs moving forward.

RareJob is in a position to take advantage of these changes. As an online English school, we pride ourselves in continuously evolving our services from teaching Japanese to speak fluent English, to preparing them to be the global leaders that the 21^st century needs. We are transitioning from teaching language acquisition to using the language to acquire new skills.

While RareJob must innovate to adapt to these upcoming trends, there are some things that should not change: our quality RareJob English Lessons, and our Makatao or people-oriented approach towards our students, tutors, and staff. As we provide chances to the students and tutors for self-improvement and livelihood, we make sure that our employees receive the same opportunities as well. We, after all, simply cannot give what we don’t have.

RareJob Philippines, Inc.’s managers sharing about their experiences and expertise.

RareJob invests in people. We take good care of employees, and in turn, they take good care of the organization as their own. By providing a competitive compensation package, a healthy work environment, career advancement opportunities, and promote work-life balance, this is how we make sure that we not only talk the talk, but also proudly walk the walk.

Like how our vision inspired us for the last eleven years, we need to keep the fire burning as we pass on the torch to the next generation of RareJob employees. In my case, I have been with RareJob Philippines, Inc. for more than 8 years, and like my colleagues, I too have my very own story of chances, a living proof that RareJob does indeed give chances to everyone, everywhere.

I have witnessed the rapid growth of the company. We celebrated our highs and learned from our lows, facing challenges head on even when change was difficult to do. We learned to accept that change must happen so that RareJob will continue to thrive.

For sure, the RareJob of today may not be the exact same company it would be in the next ten years, the same way as how the RareJob from more than a decade ago is no longer a perfect mirror of who it is today.

Nevertheless, our vision remains as the exact same four words uttered in a humble office way back in 2008: once simply a wish vocalized in the presence of a twenty-strong workforce is now a promise fulfilled by and for hundreds of thousands of individuals who saw RareJob and took the chance.