I currently live in Japan and have been for a little over a year now, but for reasons I’ll soon need to return home and basically put a pause on my education. I want to come back as soon as possible, but it’ll need to be at a different school than the one I am attending currently.
In my search for a different school I have seen tons and tons of vocational schools. I wanted to ask if they are worth anything in the current job market, or does having a normal degree completely outclass it? I’m aware of the vocational school needing to be approved by the Ministry of Education to issue an official certification, but I’m wondering if it’s worth the time at all, or if I should instead look for a standard CS degree from a normal university.
Any information or advice is welcome, thank you for reading!
by Cute_Stretch_484
2 comments
This is a copy of your post for archive/search purposes.
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**Are Vocational Schools in Japan worth it at all?**
I currently live in Japan and have been for a little over a year now, but for reasons I’ll soon need to return home and basically put a pause on my education. I want to come back as soon as possible, but it’ll need to be at a different school than the one I am attending currently.
In my search for a different school I have seen tons and tons of vocational schools. I wanted to ask if they are worth anything in the current job market, or does having a normal degree completely outclass it? I’m aware of the vocational school needing to be approved by the Ministry of Education to issue an official certification, but I’m wondering if it’s worth the time at all, or if I should instead look for a standard CS degree from a normal university.
Any information or advice is welcome, thank you for reading!
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The catch with vocational schools, especially for a “knowledge” field like programming, is that you end up *very* limited in what you’re allowed to do work-wise.
When you use a vocational school diploma to get a visa you are limited to working in your field of study and only in your field of study.
And immigration is notoriously strict about what counts as “field of study”. So if you studied programming, you wouldn’t be able to work in IT, or even web development. They’re so strict that it’s possible that if you studied front end development they wouldn’t let you work as a back end developer. (I’ve never actually heard of that exact situation happening, but I have seen similar very closely related fields get denied)
Your career progression would also be limited to to the “field of study” restrictions. You wouldn’t be allowed to take a promotion to management, or even something like a team leader position because “you studied programming, not management”.
That said, from an employment perspective (as opposed to an immigration perspective) a vocational degree isn’t *bad*. But a university degree is always going to carry more weight.