How to Move to and Find a Job in Japan! (As a Foreigner)

so if you live in Japan you'll know that the number one most asked question is what are you doing here in Japan well besides like where are you from that's basically like the what is your name of living in Japan but besides that people usually want to know what you do for a job how you got here what kind of Visa you're on and a lot of people living outside of Japan are curious about it too because you know it's a lot of people's dream to come and work here so today I'm going to go over three main things that I get asked a lot about jobs and how to move to Japan one is what kind of visas do you need to stay longterm in Japan what are your options two what are the most common jobs that foreigners work in Japan the pros and cons of both and three how do you get those jobs of course there's a million ways and a million different jobs but there are a couple common threads that I would say 80 to 90% of the people working here have probably taken so I'm going to discuss those today and then at the end I'll talk a little bit about my own personal story of what job I'm working now how I got it how I moved to Japan and all that so of course if you're a tourist you can just come on a tourist visa but but if you want to live here long term if you want to go through the joys of opening a Japanese bank account and trying to explain to the Japanese bank teller in your broken Japanese that you frankly don't care if your middle name is included on your bank statements or not you need a long-term visa and I would say of course there's a lot of different subcategories but there's probably four main types of long-term visas that are most commonly used the first is of course a marriage visa if you happen to already be married to a Japanese person or someone who already has a long-term Visa in Japan that's probably the simplest one to get but of course if you're not married it might be the most difficult one to get um assuming you know you have a method to meet Japanese people that one it's probably not recommended and if you already are married to a Japanese person you probably don't even really need this video so we're going to move on the second type is of course the student visa which of course if you get enrolled into a Japanese University you can get this Visa not recommended though unless your Japanese is like really really good or you're doing some Exchange program uh but what's more commonly done with this Visa is the Japanese language schools which basically they accept foreigners of any nationality and you go and it's about a half day every day for the week and you just learn Japanese these schools are for profit which means they accept literally everybody just like those scam online universities so as long as you have enough money in your bank account and I think you need a college degree um you can sign up and you can come to Japan and more importantly you can come straight to Tokyo cuz you can pick your school and this is probably the simplest most Surefire way to get accepted for your Visa in Japan with this Visa too you're also allowed to work part-time not full-time though just parttime they actually cap the number of hours you can work part time because they really do want you to focus on your studies you know learning Japanese the third type is what the vast majority of this video is going to be about the working Visa this one's pretty self-explanatory if you get sponsored and hired by a Japanese company you can get a working Visa of course we'll go more into that later on in the video okay and the fourth type of Visa we're going to go through this one real quick cuz it makes me salty it's the working holiday Visa basically if you're from Europe Australia basically just not America you can come to Japan and just chill here really like that's how my friends describe it to me you don't even really need a job they just let you come here for 6 months to a year just chilling the working holiday Visa I didn't even know about this until I asked like my European friends oh what visa are you on you know the typical question how why are you in Japan it's like oh I'm just on a working holiday Visa you know I'm just chilling here I'm like working holiday Visa what's that we don't have it in America it's so sad it's the best Visa by far you can just literally come here to experience the culture work around even though you don't even really have to do that and they give you like six months to a year just to just chill in Japan I don't want to talk about it how do you get this Visa don't be American that's how you get this Visa moving on okay so what are the main jobs that foreigners are most likely to get in Japan I think there's three main categories I'm going to break them down but first it's kind kind of important to understand the limitations of why I think foreigners get pigeon hold into these kind of three particular jobs instead of having you know wide access to the entire job market and of course the most obvious one is that you know I know you learned how to say CWA pendes and that that's very impressive but you're competing against native Japanese speakers and that's speaking native Japanese is usually a baseline you know for companies 98% of Japan's population is Japanese so 98% speak native Japanese so if you want to work for a Japanese company I mean shoot for the stars go apply to Nintendo of course make the next Mario game but you're going to have a hard time convincing them why should they hire you over tanakasan whose kanji has been perfected since he was 12 years old you know the second main issue is that a lot of Japanese companies really just want to hire people who are already in Japan to begin with they don't want to have to go through the whole process of hiring someone from overseas because the process of getting a Japanese Visa actually takes quite a bit you first have to get something called a Coe which is a Certificate of Eligibility which takes about 3 or so months depending on how backed up immigration is and they're always backed up and then you have to convert that into a Visa so the whole process can take about 3 to 6 months plus moving costs that the company will probably help you pay for and the end result is that it's just a lot more effort and work for a Japanese company to hire someone who isn't already in Japan there's already a lot of foreigners in Japan too so you're competing against the foreigners who are already there assuming the company wants to hire a foreigner in the first place so those kind of two obstacles understood and out of the way there are a lot of Industries who are looking to hire foreigners or you know that it's very common to hire foreigners the first most obvious one I'm sure everybody knows it already is English teaching so I feel like English teaching is almost like a write a passage for foreigners living Japan I think a majority of foreigners living here have at some point in some capacity done English teaching whether that's like you know they spent years and years doing it or they just did it as a part-time job or to pick up some extra cash and there was a reason remember that 90% of Japanese people who speak native Japanese I was talking about that same 98% speaks like 0% English so there's a high demand for it and of course as a native English speaker assuming you are a native you're like the Holy Grail The Prestige there's like a Prestige around native English speakers and they kind of Japan's a little picky about hiring native English speakers as opposed to people who speak English as a second language even if you know their second language English is 10 times better than any Japanese person could hope to be so if you're native of speaking English finding an english- speaking job might actually not be all that difficult for you at all of course with that I caution you because I've heard some horror stories about teaching English it's a wide spectrum from can be very rewarding if you're in like actual Japanese classrooms helping a teacher you get to maybe plan your own lessons down to the bottom of like aaiwa and babysitting and you might be changing baby's diapers more than teaching any English I'm not joking so breaking down the level lels a bit like I said kind of at the bottom tier I would say is daycares there's International daycares where they hire native English speakers the idea being oh I'm going to speak to the kid in English and that's how they'll learn English as a second language so a lot of Japanese parents put their kids in these daycares of course these kids in these daycares can range from I think ages like two all the way up through elementary school so you're going to be changing those two-year-old's diapers if you work at a daycare so just understand what you're going in for if you sign up for that I do think daycares can be some of the easiest English teaching jobs to get they have a high demand um and they have a high turnover rate so they're always looking to hire new people and there's a 100,000 of them throughout Tokyo especially if you already made the qualification of if you already do live in Tokyo you can pick up one of these jobs within a couple days honestly then a level above that I would say our aaas and these are kind of additional supplementary English classes so this you'll be in charge of leading a class you'll probably have like four to six classes a day depending on and these also range and age from I think about two all the way up to you know potentially high school or maybe even older depending on the aaiwa this is less babysitting although it's still a lot of babysitting but you are meant to like lead the class you're not in charge of the kids for the whole day for the whole process but these aaiwa jobs are very demanding you have to work long hours you do not get paid a lot at all you are a cog in the wheel of the machine that is feudly attempting to teach English then above that there's a lot of companies who hire a lot of English teachers and you'll kind of have a roster of actual Japanese middle schools and high schools and for example you'll have five days a week and each day you'll go to maybe a different high school or a different middle school and you'll be a secondary teacher in a actual Japanese classroom and you'll help that teacher you know teach English to that class usually that means you'll stand there kind of reading out of a textbook so the kids can hear native English pronunciation instead of the Japanese pronunciation um I heard that's a very common experience but i' say these are probably some of the better English teaching jobs because you're in actual classrooms and a controll environment and you're actually teaching the kids English a lot of times you have to create your own lesson plans too and depending on how lucky you get with your company and classroom you can actually there's actually some room for creativity and actually becoming a teacher so if you're passionate about teaching I would say these are definitely the English teaching jobs to angle for for sure okay so the second most common job I see foreigners have in Japan are recruiters recruitment is a huge industry in Japan and if you don't know recruiting is basically just they go talk to a company like hey do you have any jobs open okay I'll help you fill that jobs and then they go talk to people they're like hey you need a job well lucky for you I just talked to a company who needs someone just like you they play matchmakers between companies and Consultants so yeah a lot of these companies need to hire foreigners so the foreigners can speak to the other foreigners who the other companies want to recruit for those foreigners and because those companies want to recruit foreigners they need foreigners to help recruit for the foreign speaking companies you go what I'm saying basically a lot of the companies that need to use recruitment Services want to hire foreigners so they need foreigners in the recruitment company to hire other foreigners does that make sense did I explain that well I feel like I explained that really well and unlike English teaching um I think recruiting is actually a bit more of a viable career path you can grow within the company you can become a manager it's actually a pretty viable career and people can actually make quite a bit of money off recruitment way more than English teaching because a lot of it's commission based so if you do a really good job you can actually make quite a bit of money get motions advaning the company and there's a lot of really respectable recruitment companies in Japan that have really high earning potential but of course just like teaching recruitment exists on a wide spectrum too and recruitment more than anything can be a very stressful high pressure kind of brutal job a lot of these companies are known to just hire a bunch of people and then it's just kind of like Sinker swim some of them are going to do really well some of them are going to do really bad and they're not really going to have a lot of forgiveness or Mercy for the people who don't really meet their quotas and don't really make as much money as as they want to and of course there's a lot of really good reputable recruitment companies but there's 10 times more recruitment companies who just are known for having really terrible working conditions and treat their employees really poorly and cause a lot of stress and anxiety and expect way more from you than you could imagine so be careful about that it's kind of like anything else do your research on which recruitment companies are reputable and which ones are actually worth working for another good point about recruitment companies too though is that they're known for hiring people with no experience in recruitment it's kind of understood that you got to start from somewhere so a lot of companies actually have um different training programs within the company to get you kind of up to speed but then of course some of them just throw you into the fire sink or swim you know all that so once again just kind of depends but there's a lot of Pros to Recruitment and it is a valuable career path that is known for hiring foreigners okay third do you guys like this I've been doing my threes like this because instead of like this I do them like this cuz I think it looks cooler what do you got do you think it looks I think it looks cooler so third is it so the other most common field you see foreigners work in is the it field so things like programming uh powerbi you know working for all the big tech companies they hire they tend to hire a lot of foreigners um just because they offer a lot of skills that you know the average Japanese person you know won't have of course those Japanese it people too naturally but a lot of the big companies are very International raketen which is one of the biggest tech companies in Japan hires a bunch of foreigners and a lot of their it and Tech teams are made up of foreigners because they deal in the foreign Global Market a lot so if you're it you can set yourself apart maybe your Japanese isn't perfect but if you have good skills that are marketable to the company it is one of the easier ways to get hired for sure and it kind of Falls these jobs kind of act a lot like the jobs you'd get an American company you kind of have the same pros and cons of course it depends if you're working for a big company versus a small company but if you have any kind of it skill things right right now that are really marketable are python powerbi um kind of sales analysis if you have any of those skills it would be pretty realistic for you to maybe be able to expect to find an IT job that being said you're going to have a lot harder of a time finding an IT job if you're not already in Japan because there's plenty of foreigners with it experience in Japan and like I was saying before companies don't necessarily want to hire you if you're not even going to be able to start working for six months unless you're really exceptional so if you want an IT job a lot of the time unless you're already working for a company that maybe has a branch in Japan in which case you can maybe see if you can get a transfer it might be difficult to get an IT job outside of Japan if you're not already living here that's kind of the one downside to getting an IT job in Japan okay so those are the three main jobs that are most common for foreigners to get of course you can theoretically get any job in Japan I have friends who' have gotten marketing jobs who've gotten accounting jobs friends who have [Music] gotten you know what those are kind of the only two I can think of off the top of my head that I know some friends who have gotten those kind kind of jobs those are more like exceptional cases or kind of rare opportunities maybe if you know someone or if you have a really specific skill uh in general as a foreigner if you're looking to work in Japan I think at least at the beginning your three best options are the ones I mentioned before a side point too that should be obvious is that the better your Japanese is too the more opportunities you're going to have what I was talking about before is really if you speak pretty much no Japanese those are your best options the better your Japanese is the more and more you can get different kinds of jobs at different kinds of companies and also the best pro tip I can offer too is try to look for a more foreign based company in Japan a Japanese company that deals with a lot of foreigners or deals in the global market they're a lot more likely to hire English speakers and not care as much about your Japanese level but any amount of Japanese you can learn and improve the better odds and the better options you're going to have okay so we talked about what kind of jobs are available next how do you actually get these jobs what are the easiest ways most foreigners are able to get these jobs to move to Japan so like I mentioned before the biggest trops Les one for the jobs I mentioned don't you don't have to worry too much about speaking Japanese it's not really a requirement the bigger obstacle honestly is the fact that a lot of these companies like I said before really want someone who already lives in Japan that being said there's a lot of ways to get around that and move to Japan before even starting working these jobs so for English teaching a really common one are English teaching programs that focus on hiring foreigners outside of Japan the most common example is the jet program which I think it stands for Japanese exchange teacher exchange teacher teaching it's something like that um but it's a program that specifically hires people who live outside of Japan and will sponsor their visa the whole process is set up and if you can get through the interview process you can be a teacher and they will move you to Japan sponsor your Visa no problem the caveat to that is that if you really want to live in Tokyo or you want to live in somewhere similar your odds are not great they place you all throughout the country and I know they ask you I think there's a question where they ask you oh where do you want to work and so people write Tokyo it's it's it's not going to happen be prepared if you do the jet program to potentially get placed out in the middle of you know nowhere with all you see around you is rice fields and everything so that's one caveat but that's a good way to at least get into the country I have a couple friends who did the jet program and they worked a couple years in more remote regions and then because they already had their visa their long-term Visa they were able to move to Tokyo to find another teaching job so a common method is if you're able to find not just the jet program but there's other English teaching programs that look to hire people outside of Japan already and move you to Japan although they might not have the most ideal conditions at first if you can use them to get to Japan and work for a while afterwards you can probably easily move to Tokyo and with the English teaching experience you already have easily find an English teaching job in Tokyo or you know wherever it is that you want to teach English or that you want to be in Japan another really common route a lot of people take is coming as a a student to Japan first so like I mentioned before there's Japanese language schools universities if you can come on a student visa that counts as your long-term visa and then after you're done being a student and while you're being a student you should be job hunting by the way after you graduate from whatever program you're doing a lot of companies will be more likely to hire you because you already have the requirements and the visa to live in Japan so it's really common to come in as a student do language school or do University for a couple years and then afterwards I guess do what the purpose of school is which is to prepare you for an actual ual job strange how that like works out it kind of works the same in Japan really although just a heads up unless you're going really hard don't expect to be like native Japanese after just like one or two years of language School unless you really really try and gumb really really hard I'm just saying from my personal experience it's not enough to compete with all you know the especi all the native Japanese people especially like there's over 2,000 kanji you need to know to be fluent you're not memorizing 2,000 kanji in a year it's just just not happening I'm sorry also just fun fact this is my favorite Kani Yama it means Mountain it's my favorite because it's really easy to remember and use and it looks like a mountain all the best kanjis are the ones who actually look like you know the thing they're supposed to represent Fuji son okay so what's the best way to get a recruitment job so honestly to be in Japan already by one of the methods we already talked about to get here once again screw you you working holiday people who have it on easy mode assuming you don't have working holiday you know the student route like I was saying also if you're outside of Japan a route that may work is to look up the most common recruitment companies in Japan and this is the method my recruitment friends tell me works the best which is to go on LinkedIn don't waste your time sending out rums and applications I mean you can but it's not as successful as directly messaging these people on LinkedIn so what you should do is look up the most common Japanese recruitment companies and go on LinkedIn and find their talent acquisition people or just someone who works at the company because these recruiters jobs are to find good candidates so if you're a good candidate they want to find you already so personally messaging them on LinkedIn having your resume updated um you know having a statement ready about why you wanted to be a recruiter and directly messaging them is a good way to get your foot in the door and even if they don't have someone available they're very connected right the recruitment network is very connected so they can pass you on to somebody or tell you to talk to this person instead or let you know about any openings or even just you know tell them you want to find a job in Japan they could just actually help you find a different job even than recruiting Because you know the literal job is to employ people so if you want to try to get into Recruitment and you're outside of Japan a good way to do it might be to try to message the people on LinkedIn and see what your options are okay so for IT jobs I think this process is pretty similar to what you do in your home country you know the general Soul crushing self-esteem destroying process that is job hunting sending out a dozen resumés every day maybe getting two or through rejection emails cuz most of them can't even afford you the common courtesy of a rejection email it's pretty similar in Japan my one tip would maybe be use a recruitment company to try to find an IT job um they're going to have a lot more connections and they're going to have a better relationship with that company you want to work for anyways and they'll be able to introduce you and you'll be taken a lot more seriously than if you just send in a resume or application yourself cuz let's be real if it's a big company they probably have some automatic screening process that's going to eliminate you on the basis of something arbitrary like your eye color anyways so maybe going through a recruitment company would be a better way to get an IT job the number one tip here being of course to being in Japan already honestly I think a lot of these companies don't even look at people who you know don't already have a long-term Visa in Japan but you never know some will some are willing to hire you especially if you have a lot of experience or if you're able to add something meaningful to the company so don't give up even if you're outside of Japan it would be worth it to try to get hired by it companies directly okay so that's my main advice for the jobs available in Japan I'm going to talk now about what I did personally and my process I've already covered it in this video but basically um one thing I don't know if I was clear enough on the video is that a really important aspect here is you probably need a college degree to get sponsored for any long-term Visa I think except for that stupid working holiday Visa God you need a college degree you're going to have a really hard time getting a work visa or even a student visa a lot of the time if you don't have a college degree so I went to college um my degree was in mechanical engineering and then I worked in America for 3 years for hulet Packard HP the computer company and you know I was a very good girl my parents and Grandparents were very proud I done everything right you know gone to college gotten a good job but once I started working I kind of had this realization of like oh do I just do this for the next like 40 years than die that's kind of the plan here oh gosh and that kind of started almost like an existential crisis meltdown breakdown type of thing and so I decided to just quit my company and moved to Japan um what I did is I enrolled in a Japanese language school so I luckily I had enough money saved up and I had my college degree so those are the two main requirements for a language school and I picked one in Tokyo so I just kind of quit my job and I moved to Tokyo and originally I was only going to do one year in Japan I was just going to go spend like kind of a gap year in Japan the Gap year I never took and then come back but I kind of realized pretty quickly after moving to Japan that I wanted to stay here longer so I extended my onee Japanese language school to doing two years of Japanese language school which by the way is the maximum amount of time you can do Japanese language school and beyond that student visa so while I did my language school I was allowed to have part-time jobs and here's where I said you know most most foreigners have at least done English teaching as some write a passage kind of comes into play I started off by being a chat host so not necessarily an English teacher but I worked at this Cafe that would once again hire native English speakers you know because of the prestige and I'd basically just sit at a table with you know either one all the way up to like six sometimes Japanese people and we would just have conversations to practice their Japanese and oh my God I have some crazy stories um from being a chat host um so I would have three-hour shifts at a time so 3 hours of just kind of constantly talking you get asked a lot of the same questions a lot you end up having a lot of the same conversations but at the same time I've learned so much about Japanese culture from Japanese people how they think different interesting things some things that are a little questionable for sure um yeah so that job was really interesting maybe I'll talk more about that in a future video if you guys are interested and then from there the cafe that I was working at also offered English teaching so the front half was a cafe and in the back half there was classrooms so um after about I think two months of working there my manager was like Alysa do you want to teach English instead of just being the chat host and I was like oh that actually sounds that sounds better honestly the pay was like a little bit more of course like it was a part-time pay most parttime pay you get I think about San which is 1,000 yen which is I don't know $7.50 kind of close to American minimum wage probably um so I started teaching lessons and I actually quite enjoyed teaching those lessons I think it was probably one of the best ways to English teach which is cuz I had adults as my main students and they signed up for these classes so they were genuinely interested in learning English and I had a wide range of SK levels from the very beginning where I had to you know just talk about colors basically all the way up to people who were really good and we could have very in-depth conversations and we talked more about you know honestly sometimes like philosophy and liter literature versus you know just grammar points so that was actually pretty good and I but I only did that for about two months I think where I did my second part-time job I started it which is actually something a lot of people don't consider which is modeling so one of my friends introduced me to a modeling company and in Japan they are always looking for foreign models and because there's not that many foreigners in Japan your competition is way way way smaller you don't have to look you know like Gigi Hadid or I think that's the only model I can like remember right now off the top of my head but you don't have to look like you know some crazy La alien person to be a model here they're just looking for a lot of people in either the background of things or a hand model or there's all certain types the agency I did was kind of a jack of all trades so I did a lot of different crazy uh modeling jobs too which maybe I'll talk about once again in another video so those were the part-time jobs I did while I was in language school and then as the two years were drawing to a close I decided I still wanted to stay in Japan so of course that meant I needed to look for an actual job now because of my background and because I worked an IT job at H Packard I was going for an IT job I knew I did not want to be an English teacher I don't think I had the strength for it and I knew I didn't really want to be a recruiter because making phone calls all day sounds really scary you know that's a big part of their job you got to call people and talk to them and you know that's very scary so I didn't want to do that so I wanted to do an IT job and I did talk to a recruiter my friend introduced me to a recruiter and I told him about my background and he was the one who actually helped me get matched with an IT company who eventually hired me I'm not going to say like what the company is or what I do there for you know personal reasons I don't want to like you know reveal too much kind of do basic it stuff I'm doing python right now at the company and I do some analysis as well and I enjoy it it's a good mix the company's like half kind of foreign half Japanese so we use both languages there and we deal with a lot of um foreign companies as well so it's a good mix the culture is very it's pretty Western based instead of Japanese based which is good because Japanese work culture is pretty Infamous for having extremely long hours and extremely kind of rigid social hierarchies and structures so if that's not your jam you probably want to definitely try to work for a more foreign based company um at least one where you know they have some Global Experience so I work there full-time um it's work from home a lot of the time which is honestly probably the best thing Co gifted the world is the ability to work from home for a lot of jobs in Japan's similar so I did the typical route of I was on a student visa for two years and then now I'm on a working Visa yeah so that's my story that's kind of my advice um that's of course there's exceptions and anything is possible I don't believe anything's possible but a lot of things are possible like in Japan but these are just like the main routes the things that are commonly taken the paths that a lot of people can do and the ones that are probably easiest for foreigners let me know if you guys have any questions in the comments below I would be happy to try to answer them to the best of my ability I hope this was helpful if not a little interesting um yeah and don't forget like And subscribe if you enjoyed and I will see you guys next time joh

Channel: Lyssa Kay

Views: 80,312

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Id: lCGq41unAqI

Length: 28min 12sec (1692 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 03 2024