I’ve been in English teaching for the last few years or so (ALT, eikaiwa, cram school, etc). The current eikaiwa I work at actually pays a decent salary and offers good benefits but teaching in any capacity just seems a dead-end job. Not to mention eikaiwa teaching is just horribly soul crushing to me and I can’t imagine doing it any longer.
I want to get out of teaching. I have posted before about university teaching and the such, but honestly I’m not sure of that route either.
Can anyone offer advice to someone who wants join the normal Japanese workforce and leave the gaijin bubble?
I went to a å±¥æ´æ›¸ workshop and met with a couple recruiters. I don’t have have JLPT, but during a mock interview with the recruiters they told me I could comfortably apply to any position that requires business-level Japanese.
For experience, my resume is a bit all over the place which I believe could be the issue. I have 6 years experience working in supply chain, 3 years working as a head zoo keeper, 1 year in personal training, and 3 years in ESL.
Also, just to add in, I live in Kyushu and would like to stay for family reasons. Preferably I am looking for work in Fukuoka.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
3 comments
I think you’re in a much better position than 95% of people looking to escape ESL. If you can comfortably hold an interview in Japanese, you don’t really need JLPT.
You just need to be aware that joining a Japanese company as a seishain (let’s ignore the gaishikei dream for now) is more about your holistic value as a worker than filling a specific position. Seishain are expected to do any job the company needs them to, and often get shuffled around to different departments depending on need, career development, and other things. For example, future managers are often shuffled to different departments to get hands on experience. This also means that joining a good, reputable company is much more important than your actual job title, at least until you have a very established career.
So, more than your specific set of skills, hiring companies will be very interested in things like your motivation for changing job, whether you will work there for a long time, whether you will get along with coworkers, whether you are easy to work with, and so on. You already have a very attractive background – you can say that you want to find a long term, stable job to support your Japanese family and settle down for the very long term.
TLDR I would just try to find a seishain position at any relatively large/reputable company and go from there.
Firstly, you don’t have experience in ESL, that’s an entirely different thing than what you’re describing. If you don’t have a relevant MA and most likely some publications university teaching is probably not going to happen anyway.
Second, do you have any specific education, advanced degrees, or certification to leverage? Looking useful and checking boxes on paper here can be really important for getting in anywhere cold (meaning with no connections/ins).
If not, and with no focused work experience, you’ll seem like a less capable fresh Japanese college grad with an unrelated BA. You’ll have to focus on what field you want to actually be qualified in first to get anything that’s not general service industry, which is usually worse than eikaiwa. Depending on your age that could be really difficult to get, or it could just be a few years training up in some specific field. Obviously most people try to go in to IT, anything else and you’ll really need to find some qualification programs that actually meet your needs first.
I escaped from teaching English when I was offered a position with an international trading company. The president of the company at that time was a member of the same temple I belong to and was introduced to me by one of the monks there. It turns out they needed an English language specialist who also had business experience, which I did from the US, so they brought me on to manage their overseas suppliers. That’s kind of an unusual route but there may be a similar opportunity for you if you can find a company that needs a native English speaker for communication, correspondence, and documentation.