Dongwha Group held the ‘2018 Dongwha English Festival’ on April 20 in the main auditorium of Dongwha Enterprise’s headquarters building in Gajwa-dong, Incheon.
The ‘Dongwha English Festival’ is an event that began in 2004 under the name ‘Knowledge Paper English Presentation Contest,’ aimed at establishing a global corporate culture and identifying early on the personnel to be dispatched as expatriate staff at Dongwha Group, which operates business sites in more than 10 countries around the world, including Malaysia, Vietnam, Australia, Finland, and the United States. Over the past decade or so, the winners of this contest have completed Dongwha Group’s systematic global talent development program and are now active as expatriates in various locations overseas.
The concept of this year’s English Festival is ‘What we have?’ The aim is to once again reflect on the core competitiveness Dongwha Group has cultivated on its way to marking its 70th anniversary this year, and to use this as a stepping stone toward becoming a 100-year company.
Employees from a variety of affiliates—ranging from the materials business division (wood) to Dongwha M-Park in the auto-life business division (a used-car distribution platform)—took part in the preliminary rounds. The six participants who advanced to the finals through a fierce preliminary process each chose one of the three keywords representing Dongwha Group’s competitiveness—△First and Best Achievements △Innovation Activities △Global Dongwha People—and presented Dongwha Group’s competitiveness before the audience for seven minutes. After the finalists’ presentations, expatriates from Malaysia stationed in Korea spoke about the cultural differences and diversity they had experienced while working in Korea, sharing a meaningful time of mutual understanding.
As this is a process of selecting and nurturing the talent who will lead the future of Dongwha Group as it expands across the globe, the company has spared no effort in actively supporting the event as a whole. To begin with, in addition to the in-house foreign language education program, the company runs one-on-one native-speaker classes for the finalists. Participants intensively studied the elements essential to speaking English—such as intonation, pronunciation, stress, and breathing—as well as presentation skills.
This year’s event, the largest ever, offers a variety of benefits worth a total of about 12 million won, including prize money and encouragement funds for the teams to which the winners belong. Awards include a Grand Prize of 2 million won (1 person), as well as △Best Prize of 1 million won (1 person) △Excellence Prize of 500,000 won (1 person) △Encouragement Prize of 300,000 won (3 people). In particular, winners of the Excellence Prize and above are also given overseas travel expenses worth about 1.6 million won. This is intended to help them broaden their horizons and enhance their global capabilities through overseas travel.