Market Overview

Size of corporate training service market is estimated to be 527,000 million yen for FY2019, up 0.8% from the previous fiscal year, based on the sales at businesses. Although the growth rate remained sluggish, the market maintained positive growth. 

Viewing at business performance at each corporate training service providers, although most of them had shown steady growth in the past few years, slowdown has become obvious; many of them achieved only moderate growth for FY2019, while some providers dropped their sales significantly.

By contents, against the backdrop of companies being keen on hiring new graduates, demand for training new hires has been driving the market growth in recent years. Such trend is ongoing for FY2019 as well. 

While decrease in overall workforce creates difficulties for companies to hire employees, especially young workers, companies are inclined to invest more to employee training/human resource development. Training designed specifically for each level of employee is selling well, for example, programs for young employee/mid-career employee, for next generation leaders, for middle management and for executive candidates. In addition, since promotion of using digital technology for corporate management is becoming active lately, training courses for promoters of digital transformation (DX) is gathering momentum. 

In terms of labor management, needs stayed high for training related to work-style reform, such as productivity improvement and streamlining. So-called “work-from-home depression” due to pervasion of telework and “corona depression” associated with the outbreak of pandemic have created new needs and reactivated market demands for mental health programs, which once seemed to have reached saturation when most companies adopted stress-check services. Moreover, demand for training programs related to the Anti-Power Harassment Law rose in prior to its submission in June 2020.

Noteworthy Topics

Online Training Continue to be Active, Rise of Online English Conversation Lessons

Due to the outbreak of novel coronavirus, online training services are on a rise, especially in the field of language training. Increasing number of companies are introducing online English conversation lessons.


Traditionally, corporate English learning programs were offered only to employees who had necessity of business trip to overseas and communicate with companies overseas. Nevertheless, as Japanese companies become global, i.e. nationality of employees diversify, some companies faced needs to use English as an official language in the workplace. As such movement urged companies to expand target of training service to all employees, low-cost online training services are adopted more than English schools. 


Considering rapid digital shift in corporate training services domain due to influence of COVID-19, enhancement of online services is also an urgent issue for language school businesses. 

Future Outlook

As all year round negative impact of COVID-19 leads to downturn in business performance of user companies, it heightens pressure on companies to cutdown their budget for employee training. On the assumption, the corporate training service market is projected to shrink by 1.3% from the previous fiscal year to attain 520,000 million yen for FY2020 (based on the sales at businesses). 

Research Outline