[Manila] – Zuitt CEO Tomohisa Kato was invited to the Philippine ICT Online EXPO 2021 to share a glimpse of his journey as a serial entrepreneur in the Philippines last February 4, 2021.
The Philippine ICT Online EXPO 2021 is an event put together by JICA Project and the Philippine Software Industry Association. Armed with the intention to call on a number of distinguished businesses from Japan and the Philippines to come together, a fully interactive 5-day program was conducted to highlight the benefits of IT outsourcing in the Philippines.
Zuitt Coding Bootcamp was one of the 37 companies that participated in this online convention. The invited companies and participants were given the opportunity to attend several seminars or lecture programs and engage with the business community.
The JICA Project: Philippine ICT Online EXPO 2021
The Ambassador of the Republic of the Philippines to Japan, H.E Jose Castillo Laurel V stated that “The Philippine ICT Online EXPO 2021 seeks to link ICT companies from the Philippines with Japanese potential clients and partners. This activity will surely help accelerate our recovery from the economic slowdown.”
The ICT industry is under the Information Technology Business Processing Management Industry of the Philippines. In 2016, IT BPM employed around 1.15 million workers and is expected to continuously grow and employ 1.58 million workers by 2022. The areas of opportunity between the Philippines and Japan will be in Software Development, Engineering, Design, Content Creation, Cloud Computing, Social Media, Video Game Development, and other areas.
Tomoyuki Yamada, manager of JICA, stated that “Philippines may be regarded as a promising country especially for Japanese companies as an advanced investment destination or destination for expansion.” Truly, partnerships between potential clients will be relatively substantial for both countries as it promotes an upsurge in the employment rate and promising service with inexpensive labor.
TALK: Zuitt CEO Tomohisa Kato
As JICA aims to promote its goals, experience from a serial entrepreneur is notably encouraging for this activity. The organization invited Zuitt CEO Tomohisa Kato to share his experience on his business ventures in the Philippines.
Tomohisa Kato talked about how his businesses have been successfully listed and relaunched through outsourcing in the Philippines. His first involvement was RareJob, an online ESL school in Japan and the Philippines. Years later, he successfully launched Tuitt Inc., a school offering Full Stack Web Development training to aspiring web developers in the country.
To start his story, Kato-san went way back to his humble beginnings – the story of how he worked his way through establishing RareJob. To start operations he traveled to the Philippines and reached out to potential English teachers as the foundation of his business idea. Filipinos have high English proficiency, so outsourcing services in the Philippines was the way to go.
When it comes to working with Filipinos, Kato-san gave out advice on how to build camaraderie by teaching methodologies and by communicating repeatedly. He emphasized how the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey helped with building a win-win situation and comradeship among all his employees.
Upholding a win-win situation, he then mentioned a story of a Filipino teacher named Mayflower, a single mom who lives in the countryside and has to travel for an hour to work. All of that changed when she joined RareJob. In teacher Mayflower’s case, she was able to work remotely and spend more time with her son. It was a beautiful opportunity for her at that time since most Filipino parents go abroad and leave their children behind so that they can give them a better life.
Because of this remote setting, RareJob needed to hire more software engineers or programmers to better its services. The company had trouble finding applicants and realized that it became harder and harder to hire software engineers or programmers in both the Philippines and Japan. With this attempt, Kato-san then came up with a bootcamp which he instructed himself. He taught a few RareJob employees coding from scratch.
He also opened the door to other coding aspirants and in 3 months all 12 bootcampers were able to finish the course. .. It became a point of interest to Kato-san. Since RareJob is purely for English teaching, and not a company that teaches coding to Filipinos, it was time to start a new adventure. Establishing a coding bootcamp was Kato-san’s new mission. Thus, Tuitt Inc. was born.
In Zuitt, bootcampers are taught static applications, dynamic applications, and lastly, integrated applications. Providing a straightforward way or a step-by-step learning path, an easy-pay option, and an opportunity to start over to Filipino students helped Zuitt realize its vision to provide “opportunities for everyone, everywhere.” To date, Zuitt provided opportunities to over 1500 trainees in 80 batches for 200 employers in the country.
Kato-san’s awe-inspiring goals combined with his mission in life to provide “chances for everyone, everywhere” paved the way to realizing Filipino’s potential. Now, he continuously embraces his mission and dream to prove that Filipinos are the best Tech Instructors not only in the Philippines but also in the world.
Watch his whole speech here: http://bit.ly/ZuittCEOatPhilippineICTOnlineEXPO2021
