I’m going to summarize this as best I can in bullet points, I’m looking for advice and perspectives I haven’t thought of yet.
– From California, born and raised outside 6 years in Utah for university.
– Made the mistake of getting a bit of a useless degree (communication major, marketing minor)
Couldn’t get a job outside of a large retail store after graduating
– Wife is Japanese, fluent and familiar with everything here. We met in the US via a dating app at the height of COVID.
– I’m a manager in retail, I make about $85,000 a year. I work my ass off, and it’s only going to get worse over time. The job isn’t sustainable, is physically AND mentally exhausting. I like my boss but the nature of retail management and having ~300 employees to tend to really wear you down. There is lots of room for growth, but it doesn’t interest me. I want out of retail in the next 3 years.
– I have been wanting to study IT and get some certs for quite a while. I just don’t have the time, or energy for this daily. I work nights, weekends, from home. There is so little room to do this in my current role.
– We recently took a vacation to Japan, I loved it. Everything is so amazing, and I loved learning more about the culture, language, and feeling closer with her for it. It was great for both of us. It makes me want more.
The goal right now in my mind is to set up to move to Japan, teach English for quite a bit less money, wife would keep current job as well, and teaching would allow me to get some certifications in IT and study the language. I also have about $40,000 after selling motorcycle, car, along with my cash in the bank.
Am I crazy? I’ve been looking for a way to pivot to IT quite some time, and learning her language is on my bucket list too… I’ve never been abroad before so maybe I’m just in the honeymoon phase of traveling.
I just really want a way out of retail…
13 comments
This is a copy of your post for archive/search purposes.
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**31 and looking for career pivot**
I’m going to summarize this as best I can in bullet points, I’m looking for advice and perspectives I haven’t thought of yet.
– From California, born and raised outside 6 years in Utah for university.
– Made the mistake of getting a bit of a useless degree (communication major, marketing minor)
Couldn’t get a job outside of a large retail store after graduating
– Wife is Japanese, fluent and familiar with everything here. We met in the US via a dating app at the height of COVID.
– I’m a manager in retail, I make about $85,000 a year. I work my ass off, and it’s only going to get worse over time. The job isn’t sustainable, is physically AND mentally exhausting. I like my boss but the nature of retail management and having ~300 employees to tend to really wear you down. There is lots of room for growth, but it doesn’t interest me. I want out of retail in the next 3 years.
– I have been wanting to study IT and get some certs for quite a while. I just don’t have the time, or energy for this daily. I work nights, weekends, from home. There is so little room to do this in my current role.
– We recently took a vacation to Japan, I loved it. Everything is so amazing, and I loved learning more about the culture, language, and feeling closer with her for it. It was great for both of us. It makes me want more.
The goal right now in my mind is to set up to move to Japan, teach English for quite a bit less money, wife would keep current job as well, and teaching would allow me to get some certifications in IT and study the language. I also have about $40,000 after selling motorcycle, car, along with my cash in the bank.
Am I crazy? I’ve been looking for a way to pivot to IT quite some time, and learning her language is on my bucket list too… I’ve never been abroad before so maybe I’m just in the honeymoon phase of traveling.
I just really want a way out of retail…
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As always: If you’re looking to change careers, you should do it ***before*** you plan a big international move.
Yes, you’ll have a spouse visa, so you’ll be a bit more hireable than someone with no experience coming from outside the country, but frankly that won’t offset the age/lack of experience/lack of Japanese ability that you’re currently saddled with.
>teaching would allow me to get some certifications in IT and study the language
Can’t really speak to the “get some certifications” part, but teaching (ALTing or Eikaiwa) isn’t going to help you pick up all that much Japanese. You’ll spend all day speaking English, and many companies actually *require* you to not speak Japanese at all, even with the teachers.
So in reality you’re looking at hardcore studying for *both* your IT work and your language skills. That plus the teaching gig is going to end up being a workload similar to what you’re carrying now.
Frankly what you should be doing is picking one of your learning objectives and getting it done before you even start thinking about a move. Get the IT certs *or* spend a couple years studying Japanese, then maybe think about moving.
The teaching English part will be your issue… once you open that can of worms you can’t close the lid. Meaning your resume is fucked. Get your certs state side.
Also Japanese language is going to be important moving forward. Grab a couple years of study as well.
Set a goal for like two years from now and set aside your time. See it through and you will succeed.
The certs I recommend:
Comptia A+
Comptia net+
Comptia Linux+/
Microsoft Azure Admin
(Do the above together)
CCNA
What kind of job are you imagining getting with these IT certificates? “IT” is a pretty big field. I don’t imagine you could do a lot of them without excellent Japanese. There are definitely software development roles that exist where you can, but you’re not going to get them with a couple of certificates.
Learning Japanese is all about shoveling in the time, so you should get on that. If you learn 5 words/day (which I know sounds like a lot to some people), you’ll end up knowing 1825 words in a year – which is a lot, but it’s not a lot of what you need to know, y’know? You can find time – Anki (or memrise or whatever) while eating breakfast or taking a dump will at least be a start.
Teach English if you want – but just be aware you might get stuck there with no meaningful path up or out, if your IT plan doesn’t get anywhere.
As others have said, IT is a big field. So you may want to figure that out first.
My two cents is this though:
Some people are suggestion certs which is great if you plan on improving your Japanese. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but certs like AWS and such may require more Japanese. I know one person who has a bunch of certs and had N2 but was able to do most of his work in English. He told me this was pretty rare, but I could be wrong. My point here is, it may take twice as long as you’d be studying Japanese and IT.
My suggestion is get into programming which is what I did. Job search sucked and took a while, but now I do web dev which has been a lot of fun and I can WFH.
However, I do agree that making the career switch while in your home country will make your life MUCH easier than fumbling through it here. If you study some programming and get a year of experience working while studying some Japanese, you’ll be way ahead of most people here.
>The goal right now in my mind […] wife would keep current job as well
Are you sure about this? A lot of employers have specific rules against employees, even fully remote ‘work anywhere’ employees, moving to different countries. As a story, on my team in NY we had an Australian dude. As Covid was gearing up and we went 100% remote he figured he’d save himself some cash, break the lease on his Manhattan apartment, and move back home to Australia. His direct manager was perfectly fine with this, as long as he showed up at the important meetings and got his work done. So away he went.
He was there for about a month before HR discovered it and, even though we actually do have multiple offices in Australia, he was given the ultimatum: Quit or come back.
There are a lot of people who ran into similar situations. My brother for example was told by his employer when he went fully remote that if he wanted to move somewhere cheaper, they didn’t care… the only requirements they had was that you couldn’t move to another country, and you couldn’t live more than 3 hours from *an* office (it’s a nationwide company with offices in pretty much every city in Canada).
Regarding reskilling; its been said elsewhere in this thread but get your IT education there in the US. You can’t expect to take any courses in person here in Japan conducted in any language other than Japanese. You’ll also want to figure out what you actually mean by ‘IT’. Its a broad field and the term means different things to different people. Maybe see if your local community college has something like an ‘intro to computer science’ type course you can sign up for to wet your beak.
I would skip the English teaching and focus on studying Japanese now, getting your certifications then going to Japan. You could probably even quit your current job and study full time in the States. That probably would be less risk than trying to study while being an English teacher in Japan.
I mean studying for IT (assuming you mean web dev) is a task for 1-2 years full time. * If you take the quicker route and study well maybe ~6 months to get proficient with HTML/CSS/JS/WordPress .
Getting your Japanese from zero to low working proficiency ~N2 is also 1-2 years at language school.
So if you can take 1-2 years off, finance language school, be dedicated in your IT studies, this is your most optimistic time frame. I personally would not be able to pull that off. If you are working as a teacher and are not visiting a language school, multiply that time by three at least.
Also consider that you have a private life that also needs time.
*Edit: people have found jobs in less time, but requires you to be lucky and extremely focused on your studies. Which you likely cannot replicate.
So, a lot of people are commenting on the career/Japanese aspect. However, if you’re more looking for a “sabbatical,” you could certainly move to Japan for a couple years, study your IT certifications remotely, and do some random private Japanese lessons (but that’s not going to bring in lots of money). If you need to continue to have a salary though, as others have pointed out, there can be issues.
One thing to remember is that when you move to Japan, where you do not know the language, but your wife does, is that the dynamic of your relationship may change. Your wife will be responsible for a lot, and you will be very reliant on her. If you’re used to being independent, this can be very frustrating for you. If she has her own stuff to handle, it may be very frustrating for her. Just keep this in mind.
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vacationing in Japan and working in Japan are two completely different beasts
does your wife even want to work in Japan?
There are positions you could try for at international companies (including tech) that don’t necessarily require deep IT knowledge, such as PM (Project Manager / Program Manager) or other managing/logistics/organizational positions. I figure your management experience may be useful? You could also look into online bootcamp courses for such things. Then seek out specific companies, and possibly recruiters/headhunters, to seek positions that don’t require business-level Japanese (since even if you start studying, you won’t be able to attain quickly).
Teaching English is an option, but in my personal experience, it can be so tiring/draining, you may not have any energy left over to really pursue another career path.
With your savings and your wife’s job, if you live on the cheaper side, you could enroll in Japanese language school while applying for jobs at international companies. If you really wanted to get serious about a career change, you could even go back to school and get a master’s or something, but that’s probably a lot more extreme than you want to do.
You could always plan to pursue English teaching for later if the other stuff all falls through, since you won’t be any more or less qualified for that later than you are already, as a native speaker. Well, unless you get a teaching degree and certification(s), which would put you in a position to potentially get better jobs at private schools/universities, rather than English conversation schools (arguably the worst possible teaching jobs).
Good luck!
I teach English in Japan and I’m not sure I really would recommend coming here if you want to stay long-term unless you know Japanese. your wife knows Japanese but unless you know Japanese, you may be socially handicapped. It’s quite annoying when you can’t do daily things without Google translate.
You’re not gonna make anywhere near 85,000 teaching English. I kinda hate how much I make but I know I’m only doing it for a year or so, so I’m just toughing it out.
Lastly, I wouldn’t recommend moving to Japan to teach English as a form of escapism from your current job. Maybe moving to Japan could be the right decision in the future but I don’t think it’s the right decision currently given your satisfaction with life/job.