A 2005 survey by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry revealed that Japan has a 29% shortage of qualified embedded software engineers.
Fewer and fewer Japanese students now major in engineering. And those who do are generally less talented students, compared with students of earlier generations. Upon graduation, they are of little or no immediate value to their new employers.
The opposite trend is occurring in China. The recent growth of higher education in China is unprecedented. Dozens of its universities are now world class institutions. From 2000 to 2009 the number of new college graduates grew, from 1 to 6 million. Half were engineering students. And their technical skills and English proficiency are remarkably strong.
In 2000, Dr. Hideaki Kobayashi, founder of Knowledge Edge, began advising Japanese companies to utilize Chinese engineering talent. A major division of the Ricoh Company hired us to lay the foundation for its first electronics devices' development team in China. Between 2002 and 2006, Knowledge Edge employed and trained 30 recent Chinese grads in Shanghai. In July 2006 they became Ricoh staff members. They are now the core design team at Ricoh's new development center in Shanghai. This experience led Knowledge Edge to launch PIP, whose mission is training and delivering top young Chinese expertise to our client companies.
