Hitachi have adopted the BULATS Writing Test as the company's official personnel appraisal program. Here, Hitachi employee trainer Michihiro Hirai gives us some feedback on why they've chosen BULATS.
When I was still at the Hitachi Institute of Foreign Languages (HIFL), which is a residential intensive English training centre for Hitachi, Ltd. and its subsidiary companies, I evaluated a number of English qualification tests and recommended the BULATS Writing Test to the company's management. Now Hitachi, Ltd. has officially adopted it as part of its personnel appraisal system.
Through my experiences as Director of HIFL during the last four years of my service at Hitachi and also as a liaison between overseas customers and factory engineers during the preceding years, I have come to acutely realize not only that English is essential to our growth as a global enterprise but also that active skills (speaking and writing skills), rather than passive skills (reading and listening skills), are what our employees need to improve most. My recent research at HIFL has shown that, at least among Japanese businesspersons, active skills do not correlate strongly enough with passive skills and hence should be addressed with a specifically focused approach. This should include test and evaluation as well as training: different yardsticks should be employed to measure different skills. Before I took the office at HIFL, the company had already been using an off-the-shelf passive skill test and an in-house speaking test as measures for the employees' English abilities. What we needed was a reliable writing test relevant to our business environments.
As an avid English learner myself, I have taken a number of English proficiency tests available in Japan and thus have acquired a good grasp of them. In terms of validity (relevance to the company's business), reliability, and world-renowned authority (Cambridge University), I picked the BULATS Writing Test and conducted an evaluation run of it on our employees in cooperation with the British Council in 2001. Substantiated by actual data, my proposal went through this year (2002), resulting in the adoption of it as the company's official personnel appraisal program.
Michihiro Hirai
Summer, 2002
