On Sun, 9 Mar 2003, Conor wrote:
> What I want to know is, what qualifications do employers over here
> usually require, and what level of Japanese is expected.
Well, I won't claim to have seen a whole lot of the job market in Japan,
but about a year ago my dot-com here dot-bombed, and I had to go out
hunting for a new job.
The biggest problem I found, after the downturn, was that it became
much, much harder to find a job that did not require reasonably fluent
Japanese. I suspect that when companies really needed to hire people,
they were willing to live with people who would have to do some work in
English, but now that there are a lot of programmers and techies out
there on the market looking for work, they would need a really, really
good reason to hire an English speaker. (Most of them had no interest
at all in me once they found out my Japanese is very poor, and I've had
more than ten years experience in the industry, have run the entire
technical side of an ISP, and am in general pretty good at what I do.)
As far as learning Japanese, I'd recommend that you start studying kanji
right away. If you can't deal with e-mail, you're probably not going to
get far in a computer job. And kanji isn't as hard as some people make
it out to be, either; after two years here I can in fact read better
than I can understand spoken conversations. (Not that either is great--I
wouldn't consider my Japanese adequate for a Japanese-only workplace.)
But it's a bit tough, because there aren't a lot of resources out
there to help you learn kanji as you learn basic Japanese; most of the
stuff for English speakers tries to keep you as far away from kanji as
possible.
Anyway, the most important thing you can do in Japan, as far as getting
a job goes, is the same as anywhere else: schmooze. I've never yet
gotten a job through a recruiter; it's always been via knowing the right
person at the right time.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Thu Mar 13 02:04:44 2003