Considering working in Japan as a computer/electrical engineer

7 comments

1. Is transit the only reason you want to move to the other side of the globe? It would be a lot easier to just move to a city with good transit.

   Moving to another country is hard and if you’re not particularly interested in the culture of that country, there’s a good chance the bad will outweigh the good of such a move.

2. You have to get a visa, which means you need a Japanese company to sponsor you, which likely mans that you need a ton of experience.

   The thing is, there’s no shortage of Japanese people in Japan who could be hired for those positions, so you either need to speak incredibly good Japanese or be in such a niche position that the companies have to look outside of Japan and will go through the effort of sponsoring your visa.

   You just need to find other people who have also done this kind of work and try to get the info from them because most of what you’re facing is going to be visa related.

3. I’d recommend looking at salaries for comparable jobs. If you’re in America, it will 100% be a pay cut for similar work. It’s up to you to decide if its worth it.

   Also, I would suggest looking into internship programs through your university. ESID but through my university I was able to secure a year long placement. If you’re open to extending your degree (Nothing wrong with it imo), I think its a good idea to look into as a trial.

4. I want to do something like this too. But I realized that it would be the smartest to already have a software/IT job from a foreign company before going to Japan. Also I am INTJ personality so not sure if it would be good or bad experience because of the seriousness of my personality. Finally is the planning of going into such a different side of the world where I do not know the language or their culture well. I will have to spend months preparing for it.

5. Im not sure this will help. Since I’m from mechanical degree, with some robotic & automation background. I have been lurking in LinkedIn for a year and will have an interview with some job related to Matlab Simulink.

   There have been more application engineer vacancies for PLC/PAC and industrial PC. I think European companies are more leeway in hiring foreigners compared to mitsubishi electric.

   NI is currently hiring.

   Other trendy thingy are semiconductor manufacturing. Maybe you can check micron.

   IT wise there will be always vacancies for big data and machine learning. Followed by automation and QA. IT job openings are always higher than mechanical & electrical combined.

   Cool companies like Sony always state that master education is minimum requirement.

   Robotic start up are dying to recruit C++, Python expert. Labor automation, picking robot, cooking robot, machine vision. Companies also varies from 100% Japanese to multicultural one.

   Embedded system software are kinda rare for foreigners.

   I worked contract job in machinery manufacturer for printing electronics. Two engineering department, mechanical and electrical. Many factories located far from city centre so you will need cars anyway, especially outside Tokyo. So check location in advance.

6. I’m currently working as a games engineer in Tokyo, so we’re pretty close in terms of field.

   You’re right in that you’ll need both a degree and experience. However, you will also need a company that will sponsor your visa. As for work culture, more progressive companies will be less strict.

   As for language – N2 level (not necessarily need the paper). If you can do an interview in Japanese, read business documents, etc, then you may be able to convince the interviewer that you don’t need N2 to do your job. I say “may” because it really depends on who your interviewer is. The only reason companies look for N2 is because that’s the requirement to get into universities.

   If you can find a US company that has a Japan branch, then you will have no big issues apart from maybe getting around once in the country since the visa you get will be the intra-company transferee instead of the engineer visa.

   If you really want to work for a Japanese company right out from graduation, consider setting up interviews in December-ish as that tends to be the time companies are doing interviews to get people to start in April.

7. If you want to do EE in Japan you will need N1 Japanese proficiency and on top of that also knowledge of EE specific language and standards. Things are different here (e.g. JIS vs ISO) and most of design/manufacturing done in Japan is actually for the Japanese domestic market. Landing job in international company is indeed possible but you need to convince them they need you here in Japan and not in the US and usual reason for that is you speak language/know local regulations/etc. There are opportunities in automotive but unless its software it usually requires language proficiency again.

   There are some IoT startups which might be interesting opportunity to explore. They usually don’t expect you to speak Japanese and also do not follow Japanese company “tradition” (if I had to chose between driving and working for true Japanese company I’d chose driving lol) and look for hardware people as there’s relatively good software engineer market but not that many circuit designers for reasons I mentioned above. I recommend you to watch https://japan-dev.com as sometimes these jobs popup there…

   As for visa, if you convince company they want you and have degree, you are generally ok.

   EDIT: Should’ve mention that language proficiency is not hard requirement for work itself; but often is hard requirement to go through certifications which aren’t usually conducted by the company itself.