Every year from April through summer, something curious happens in the Japanese tech industry. Well-known companies like Recruit, MIXI, Cybozu, and GMO Pepabo publish the training materials from their internal new-grad engineer programs, complete curricula, slide decks, and even lecture videos, entirely for free.
For learners, this is a gift: professionally built courseware that companies spent serious money and engineering time on, free to read. But step back and it looks strange. Training materials are real assets, built over weeks by senior engineers. Why put them where competitors, and people who will never join the company, can read everything?
This article digs into that "why," then curates the most notable publicly available materials by category. Once you understand the reasons, you will also read the materials a little differently.
An annual tradition: the training material release season
First, the current state of things. Publishing training materials is not a one-off whim by a few companies. It has become an established annual event in the Japanese tech industry.
In 2025 alone, Recruit published 18 of its 24 training courses, MIXI released 15 subjects of material plus lecture videos, and Cybozu and GMO Pepabo continued their yearly releases. Tech news sites cover the "release season" every year. Recruit has been doing this since 2017, and GMO Pepabo since 2016.
Globally, this is a rare culture. Tech companies everywhere publish open source and engineering blogs, but the custom of releasing an entire new-grad training curriculum every year is almost unique to Japan. The reason is structural: Japanese companies hire new graduates in batches and train them together every April, so a coherent, systematic curriculum gets produced in-house every single year. That steady supply of publishable courseware is itself the Japanese twist. For what companies elsewhere publish instead, see Free Learning Resources from Big Tech.
Why give it away? Five reasons
Now the main question: why is it rational for a company to give away expensive teaching assets?
Reason 1: Recruiting brand. The materials are a showcase of technical strength
This is the biggest one. Training materials are the most convincing showcase of a company's engineering level.
Writing "we invest in engineer education" in a job posting is easy, and proves nothing. Showing the actual curriculum does. A well-structured training program tells candidates at a glance: "join us, and this is what you will be taught." Students and junior engineers who read the materials start wanting to work there, and the people attracted by the quality of the materials are precisely the ones most interested in engineering. The quality of applicants rises too.
The lineup of courses also signals what a company currently values. For example, Nifty replaced its machine learning course with a generative AI course in its 2024 program. The curriculum change itself is proof that the company keeps up with the technology curve.
And the release itself makes news. The annual announcement is reliably among the most-read posts on each company's tech blog and gets picked up by media. Publishing training materials is a machine that converts an asset you already built into fresh PR every year.
Reason 2: Ecosystem strategy. Grow the pool of engineers who know your stack
When a company teaches its technologies and design philosophy publicly, the market gains engineers familiar with that stack. A Rails shop publishes Rails training; an iOS shop publishes iOS training. If someone who learned from your materials joins you years later, part of their onboarding cost has already been paid.
Even if they never join, having more people in the industry who understand and like your stack pays off long-term, both in hiring and in the technical community.
Reason 3: Publishing forces the materials to get better
The assumption that outsiders will read it forcibly raises quality. Explanations that would pass as "good enough" internally must become accurate and well-structured once they will be published. The result is a more systematic curriculum that is also easier to use internally.
After release, external feedback arrives: corrections, missing perspectives, better examples. Those are improvements a closed internal loop would never surface. Publishing your training materials is, in effect, outsourcing their review to the entire world.
Reason 4: Giving back to the community. An extension of open source culture
Tech companies are built on open source and community knowledge. The languages, the frameworks, the articles engineers read daily, someone published all of it for free. The norm of giving back, not just taking, runs deep in engineering culture.
Publishing training materials is a natural extension. If the industry's overall engineering level rises, the company's hiring market, partners, and technical foundations all get richer in return. It is a long-term investment in the ecosystem rather than a short-term trade.
Reason 5: Near-zero marginal cost, compounding returns
The last reason is unglamorous but important. The materials get built for internal training whether or not they are published. The extra cost of publishing is little more than a confidentiality check and a blog post.
Remote training accelerated this. When training happens through slides and recordings, the output is already in publishable form. With near-zero marginal cost and reasons 1 through 4 compounding every year, not publishing starts to need the justification.
The best publicly available training materials
Here are the most notable materials, in three categories. Note that most are in Japanese (Mercari is a notable exception with English content), but even so, the code samples, slides, and curriculum structure travel well, and they offer a rare window into how strong engineering organizations train their people.
Full curricula, updated every year
These companies publish their entire new-grad curriculum annually. Large in volume, broad in coverage.
| Company | What they publish |
|---|---|
| Recruit | Published yearly since 2017. In 2025, 18 of 24 courses, including modern frontend development, large language models, test-driven development, and a product security exercise |
| MIXI | Published yearly since 2021. In 2025, 15 subjects plus lecture videos: Git, databases, software architecture, QA and software testing, and more |
| Cybozu | Published yearly since 2018. Broad lecture materials from development topics to technical writing, with some lecture videos |
| GMO Pepabo | Published yearly since 2016. The 2025 program includes Rails web application training and a "Vibe Coding" course on AI-first development |
| Mercari | "DevDojo" internal training slides and videos on a dedicated page, in both English and Japanese, covering AI, backend, QA, and more |
| Nifty | New-grad engineer training covering HTML/CSS/JavaScript, Linux, and containers, with the machine learning course reworked into a generative AI course |
Single-topic deep dives
Materials focused on one area. Better than the full curricula when you want to strengthen one specific skill.
| Company | What they publish |
|---|---|
| CyberAgent | Data modeling training, plus courses on MySQL performance investigation, MLOps, and more, published per year |
| Yumemi | iOS training on GitHub: a staged, assignment-based curriculum where you build a weather app step by step |
| Everyleaf | "el-training," a Ruby on Rails onboarding curriculum widely reused by other companies for their own training |
| Hatena | The "Hatena Textbook," a web development curriculum on GitHub with over 2,000 stars |
| KDDI Agile Development Center | Hands-on generative AI training for new grads: prompt engineering, RAG, and AI agents |
| CARTA HOLDINGS | Test-driven development and pair programming training taught by TDD evangelist Takuto Wada (t_wada) |
| Sansan | R&D new-grad training covering practical web application development and test code |
Mindset and engineering fundamentals
These focus less on specific technologies and more on how to work and learn as an engineer.
| Company | What they publish |
|---|---|
| Willgate | "Engineer Fundamentals" training: mindset, communication skills, and how to catch up on new technology |
| Classi | New-grad training "Soudai School": a lecture series on topics like the craft of releasing and growing through daily work |
"Free to read" and "free to use" are different things. Terms differ by company. For example, MIXI allows use in study groups and internal training, but not in settings where participants pay a fee. If you plan to redistribute materials or reuse them in your own training, always check each company's license and terms of use.
The catch: two walls you will hit
With this much free courseware, self-study might seem solved. Start reading, though, and you hit two walls.
The first is the assumed audience. These are new-grad engineer training materials, written for people who already passed a technical hiring process. Basic computer literacy, terminal skills, and Git fundamentals are treated as given and skipped. Without that base, you stall within the first few pages.
The second is that reading alone doesn't build skill. In the actual training rooms, the slides are just the skeleton; the real substance is the hands-on time, the exercises, pair programming, and questions to the instructor. What gets published is only the skeleton, so reading it is not the same as taking the training. That understanding and doing are different skills is consistently confirmed by learning research.
So the order that makes these materials work is: first build the foundation, terminal and Git, by actually typing commands. Then move to the corporate materials and try each command as you read. WebTerm Learn is built for exactly that first step: a browser-only sandbox with no installation, where you alternate between short slides and hands-on exercises, and can reset instantly no matter what you break.
Frequently asked questions
Can I use these published training materials for free? For personal learning, yes, you can generally read them freely. However, terms differ by company. For example, MIXI allows use in study groups and internal company training, but not in settings where participants are charged a fee. If you want to redistribute materials or use them commercially, always check each company's license and terms of use.
Can I learn from corporate training materials as a complete beginner? Most of these materials assume the baseline of a new-grad engineer: basic computer literacy and some programming fundamentals. Complete beginners often get stuck early. Building your foundation first, especially the terminal and Git through hands-on practice, dramatically improves how much you absorb.
When are training materials usually published each year? Most Japanese companies run new-grad training in April, when the fiscal and hiring year starts, and publish the materials on their tech blogs from early to mid summer. Announcements tend to cluster between May and August.
Next steps
The foundation for reading any of these curricula can be built in your browser, starting today.
- Terminal Introduction: the Linux command basics that most training materials assume, hands-on from zero.
- Git Introduction: the one tool that appears in nearly every company's training, practiced in a sandbox that is safe to break.
Once the foundation is in place, pick a company from the lists above and start reading. Materials feel completely different when you can try everything, not just read it.