I personally feel very grateful to this company for pursuing enthusiastically the capability development of employees.

Ms. Yoshiko Tominaga, Marketing Manager, General Medicne Business Unit

Bayer Yakuhin has also prepared many other unique internal training programs and there are also opportunities for Japanese to participate in some global ones.  I say “internal” training programs, but there may be interaction with people working in different business fields such as agricultural chemicals and veterinary pharmaceuticals, which can be full of much stimulation.  I personally feel very grateful to this company for pursuing enthusiastically the capability development of employees.  Maybe I should say this is also part of the Bayer culture.

Bayer has established systems that each individual employee can make sure with his/her supervisor in regard to things like the allocation of work, support for capability development and hopes for work areas and divisional transfers, etc.  Apart from the annual objective setting and performance appraisal, the company has made arrangements in order to understand the desires of individual employees using “Communication Sheets.”  Of course, it is possible to express your thoughts to the management at any time but in the reality there are few opportunities to talk like that from a long-term perspective.  There are many examples in which people favorably gained valuable training and job opportunities by articulating own desires and career plans on a Communication Sheet and I am one of them myself.

Before I came to work in Marketing Division, I was facilitating development projects with many people in a cross-functional team in the Product Development Division.  Drug development, which is highly specialized and where procedures are laid out in detail, requires various works to be advanced in parallel.  You may face situations where the people have different opinions depending on their roles, but this is natural for any organization.  Acknowledging such differences and searching for better solutions with sharing a common goal are essential to overcome various difficulties.  I would not just say that I acquired knowledge of actual work and accumulated experience in the Division; I feel that I was also able to realize once again how important the construction of mutual trust with individual people is to get things done.  

Acquiring approval is a large milestone for a drug development project, but considering the company as a whole, having healthcare professionals recognize the true value of that drug and having more patients get better are our ultimate goal.  In recent years, Marketing people have been actively involved from the development stage in order to actualize a new drug to satisfy medical needs and I came to think that I wanted to do such work in the Marketing Division too.  After I talked with my manager in Product Development about my intension, it took about 2 years for the transfer to actually take place, but I experienced several important work assignments during that period.  If I had not those 2 years, maybe it would have been difficult for me to take on the role of bridging between the development and marketing.  I am grateful to be given the chance for desired work with such good timing and subsequently, that I have been blessed with the company environment where I would undertake many challenging jobs.  I would like in the future to contribute even just a little to further facilitation of such an environment.