On January 19th, approximately 50 people attended the briefing session (held in person as well as online) for NAIST's 2021 Overseas Staff Development Training Program.

 The Overseas Staff Development Training Program was established in 2007 to further develop support for international education activities and to improve general planning skills and abilities for promoting the systematic globalization of graduate school education through language training, on-location surveys, debates, etc. at overseas universities.

 Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, this year's program was held online for the first time. Two administrative staff members participated in a program with Hawaii Tokai International College (HTIC) from October 26th-November 5th, 2021 and another administrative staff member participated in a program with Macquarie University for 4 days from September-December. These are hands-on training programs where the trainees pursued investigations based on their own research themes through lectures and interviews with university students and/or administrative staff members in Hawaii or Australia, and gave presentations summing up what they learned to close the program.

 In their reports, the trainees explained their research findings on support for LGBTQ+ students, the differences in staff work-styles in student support sections in Japan and Hawaii, admissions advertisement strategies, etc. In addition, they mentioned the positive and negative aspects of conducting the training program online: they found it effective being able to continue working regularly while participating the program, but also they found it hard really grasp other trainees' responses during talk sessions. Following this, President SHIOZAKI Kazuhiro, the Executive Directors and a number of administrative staff members asked questions related to ideas for practicing what they learned from the program and improvement of online training programs.

 Finally, Executive Director WATANABE Goro gave remarks complimenting the three trainees as they were able to achieve significant results that can be used to improve their performance regardless of the restrictions of the online format. He also sent them an encouraging message that he hopes they can go abroad when possible to gain experiences that can only be had by meeting and talking with local people and experiencing different cultures in person.