(Reposting this because my original post got buried by spam filter.)
Hi, I am trying to move to Tokyo.
Some of my info:
My SO is Japanese and we are trying to close the gap, but we’d like to find a way without jumping to marriage because he is not settled in his career and it still feels too early for our relationship. I have studied abroad in Japan, I have local friends there, am very familiar with the city; I’m looking to settle there long term, not “just try it out.” Unfortunately, I am just past the age cutoff for a working holiday visa.
I have N1 and am fairly comfortable in Japanese but don’t have experience using it in a corporate role. I have had a couple of meetings with recruiters and interviews in Japanese and they went okay.
I also have a degree in CS and have been applying for IT positions (both directly and through recruiters) the past month but have only gotten two interviews. I have frontend dev experience but I have had one foot out the door of my programming career the past several years (I am a freelancer) and feel like I’m lacking tangible skills and experience compared to other mid-career engineers, although I am still passing coding challenges.
I know a lot of the advice is that going for ALT is stupid if you have SWE skills, but I guess I am just feeling really discouraged and not up to snuff with the degree of experience and skills employers are expecting. I’m pretty confident in my ability to get there, but is it stupid to work on upping my SWE skills *while* an ALT to just get myself in Japan first? Ofc I have personal reasons for wanting to be able to move as soon as possible as well.
If I don’t get an offer from the one company I am currently still being interviewed for, I see my options as follows:
* Just keep trying with applications with my current CV? I have just been applying through direct postings and recruiters on LinkedIn for the most part. Is there anything I could be doing differently? Ways I could be making better use of my contacts in Japan?
* Take more time to seriously focus on reviewing and polishing my dev skills and work on a big showcase project to be more competitive before trying to send out applications again to the kind of postings I’ve been applying for this round
* Find some ALT position to get visa (I do have actual teaching experience for other subjects), then can work on pivoting back into IT when already in Japan, while having access to pool of employers who will only hire residents?
* Get a student visa? Language school feels redundant considering I already did that before and am already at N1… Is it worth looking into grad school in Japan?
Does that sound about right? Idk I don’t have any specific questions but was just hoping for some general insight or opinions on what path I should take.
by NoDefinition4835