If you are currently an ALT, what have you go to lose?
If you mean an IT support call center, yes they train you because it’s expected.
There are jobs like this. The “catch” really depends on company. It might be a good workplace with experienced senior programmers that just can’t find enough people, or it might be a rubbish place with a revolving door of employees and exploitative bosses. The only thing that’s certain is it’s not going to be among the most attractive or selective companies, but it might be a good way to get a foot into the industry.
Simply based on that alone, no it is not a scam. It might be a scam, but it isn’t a scam because they claim to train new hires from zero.
It was/is actually a common practice in traditional Japanese tech companies (and traditional Japanese companies in general). Companies hire people regardless of their experience, and then put them under a mentor who is meant to teach them everything they need to know to do their job.
That having been said, these types of places tend to be stuck in the past in more ways than one. They tend to never update their stack, because their engineers never have much knowledge outside of what is already known/used within the company. This was kind of okay 20 years ago? But these days technology is advacning so fast it is a formula for failure.
It is also common at SES (System Engineering Service) based companies. SES companies primarily offer their services to other companies who need some kind of tech related services done: maintain an old website, add a feature to an existing website, etc. They are outsourced to from other companies that don’t have their own employees for their tech needs.
SES companies don’t generally just deal in a particular stack or technology, they tend to do whatever is asked of them, and many will put you on a job regardless of whether or not you actually have applicable experience and expect you to learn on the job.
There is an image in a lot of traditional Japanese companies that programming is unskilled labor that doesn’t take a lot of creativity, and a lot of traditional Japanese companies offer salaries based on that expectation.
This is common to hire new Japanese graduates who have 0 experience with IT or no degree in IT and train them in Japan, however it’s rare to hire a person from abroad without IT skills(degree in IT).
Technically my job advertised “no experience necessary. 12 months training provided”. It’s been ok so far. Not much actual training though, more sink or swim.
I have worked at a company like that for 2 years, and have met many people who have as well (in different companies of the same type)
It is a great stepping stone to get further into an IT career from 0, however prepare to be worked and squished to the last of your ability, as they really leverage the education they are giving you with the workload. It can be pretty spartan, but you’ll get to participate in cert seminars for free, and usually get the cert exams paid for. Just know you’ll be required to pass something akin to a CCNA within one year, or half a year, from joining the company, and then constantly get new certification to make yourself available to a wider range of work the company is seeking out. Passed Security+ just by studying, with almost no actual work security experience? Great, go and do this major firewall migration project for a MAJOR Japanese company next month. You’re quite low in the outsourcing(contracting?) chain as well, so prepare to be pressured by the 3-4 companies outsourcing to you above as well.
After getting some workable skills, you either get put into the project mill inside the company, or are sent out to a partner (usually much bigger) company as helpdesk/sysadmin helper/project engineer. etc
Like I said, you most probably will be expected to work the full 40 a week + 30 or more overtime a month, but it is an amazing opportunity to get something from nothing if you’re willing to put up with it for 2 years or so. It’s how I went from 0 education (HS graduate), work history and marketable skills besides English and Japanese to main system/cybersecurity admin at a gaishikei in 3 years.
EDIT:Seeing the other comments in here, I seem to have been quite lucky with my enviroment regarding growth (even though it still was Black and cheap as hell). Guess you won’t learn much if you’re just doing enough to get by, in my case I caught my bug for fascination with cybersecurity and went above and beyond with studying and testing, which might have given me a better result. The companies often don’t mind if you basically start living in them, and use their testing equipment, so I took the opportunity to learn and experiment hands-on with some really expensive firewalls, routers and switches you would otherwise have to simulate.
Just watch out for fake job scams. They can even set up fake Linkedin profiles and fake company websites. If they ask you for money upfront for admin, or they send you “funds” to “buy equipment”, run away!
Yes. They won’t. Sometime they outright lie, sometime they put out posting through company like エン転職 or Mynavi and the PIC just write whatever to get more applicants.
I worked for 1 tech IT company (which turns out to be 客先常駐 which if you don’t know is haken but with tiny bit of job stability).
They told me they would train me before I graduate and enter their company blah blah blah only to made me do 海外人材紹介 cause I *already* have experience with that they said. I can switch to IT but then I have to *train myself*
Got out of that but since I didn’t (still don’t) have any coding knowledge I stick with a desk job. But 外資 so at least the pay is good.
One IT (also 客先常駐) directly told me they would gladly take me in if I promise to do everything they ask (zangyo and all) and work like a dog since I “don’t get the rights to be picky when I quitted my first job after only 6 months.”
>Only planning to work at a place like this until I can go somewhere better.
So I’ve worked in IT for a long time and also been in charge of hiring people to various extents.
IF you are lucky enough to find one of these companies that “claims” to train you from 0 to engineer and actually gives you a decent education than sure its a decent stepping stone. The problem is; that rarely happens.
As other people have mentioned, you will be worked to the bone and won’t have time to learn things apart from what you’re required to work on ( which will be old tech stacks).
On top of that, unless you really buckle down on studying yourself and can prove you know what you’re talking about, most large decent tech firms in Japan won’t hire you. Because you haven’t really learned. You’ve learned to do the task they’ve given you, but you won’t become a decent developer will a deep knowledge about the topics on hand.
So my advice is always, don’t bother. 9/10 you just waste a few years and have nothing to gain for it. You’d be better off studying with that time.
Just to put this out there as well, a few years at a company like that means you’re still a junior developer at best. The industry in Japan (the jobs with good salaries) aren’t interested in junior developers. The industry needs Middle/Senior and up.
This is actually quite common from where I came from. I used to work at a oursourcing company that frequently hired people from language schools and train them for dispatch position.
The result is usually mixed. Some people manage to craft out a nice career as developers, some move to PM or BridgeSE roles, some even move to sales. And a non neglible numbers fail to make it in Japan and return home.
In some cases they even pay part of the language school fee, and in exchange the new guys will have to work for them at least 2 or 3 years, or pay the money back. Although I know of more than one case that quit before that and never paid anything back.
I’m likely the outlier here with my experience but I personally work one of these IT training jobs with no IT experience (but have JLPT N1/no issues communicating in Japanese). I have no overtime and I’ve been studying for about 5 months so far, and they put me on the 2-3 month long new hire training starting this April with the fresh out of uni people. My company basically paid me to get certs and covered the fees as well. It’s a pretty comfortable gig but I think I just landed an especially nice company and got lucky
I have worked in companies like this. For japanese employees with 0 experience, some times without even a college degree, they had the first few months learning useful skills like cloud, network, java, etc. And then they would be outsourced to the client. I think people who had 0 experience couldn’t choose an area so you could end up having to move to the other side of the country.
For foreign employees they only hired people with previous experience so we couldn’t participate in these trainings, but they did pay for certifications and had online courses. I used that to get a certification myself.
I took a job like this. Not in the IT part but for programming. I’m an in-house system engineer for a small company that receives outsourced projects. They trained me for 6 months where I basically sat with programming textbooks and did the MOOC.fi java course and practice projects. After 6 months, I began working on a real project. That’s finished and now on another study period for like a month to learn C#. Honestly my work isn’t bad at all, low pressure, supportive coworkers, it’s just the salary and work hours are long (16万, and will probably barely increase). But I’m improving my tech skills and Japanese everyday, so it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for now.
The ones you see regularly on indeed etc?
Its legit but there is a slight catch.
They’ll have you do some other type of menial work while they train you. Most of the time its working in a call centre or as a sales person somewhere while you study in your own time or time set aside by the company. Then after you complete the training they’ll dispatch you to a company that needs whatever skill you learned.
It’s going to be really hard to place you into one of the call centre/sales jobs if you aren’t a native Japanese speaker so must companies will pass on you unless you have enough IT skills NOW to place you in a low level IT position.
Pay is low and training probably wont be the best, but its a step into the right direction if you want out of Ekaiwa/ALT.
It means you’re gonna spend all day answering phone calls and managing tens of shared excel files at once. While being bombarded with work culture manners and rituals like meetings, reports, etc.
In our company they just tell you to get LPIC or CCNA asap. They have some lame video courses on a local portal that no one uses. Everyone just grinds practice tests on Ping-t website until they get 100% and that’s it. The company doesn’t even provide a paid account there, or any other platforms like udemy, linkedin, etc. You’re on your own basically.
Pray it’s not a dispatch company. They’ll handle you to some lame client that needs an english “bridge” to their overseas branch that has several stalled projects which will all be on you when you join. Or just send you to glue some stickers on boxes in some warehouse in inaka.
I dunno how bad it is compared to being an alt since I’m not a native speaker but you can simply use it as a stepping stone to get some certs so you could get a foot in a door of a better company. Dunno if all the stress and pressure you get there worth it though..
This is a wonderful opportunity
No IT company wants people without experience. If a company is willing to pay you to train there. Absolutely accept it.
After 1-2 years you’ll be getting calls from recruiters left, right & center. (Make a LinkedIn profile)
Um how old are you OP?
If you are still in the late 20s then yes maybe you can learn something, but be ready to jump ship when it is obviously you are no longer learning anything new.
Unless it is a big company, there is a high chance that what they say they will “teach” is merely up to the task they needed you to do, not something that can help you make a 180 degree career change to become a full developer. It is highly likely you have to study on your own during your free time.
Worse, most of the time these tend to be just sweat shops (Black Company) with significant unpaid overtime and super cheap salary. What they claim to “train” is quite often a honeypot to attract unaware workers.
I assume any company that wants to hire and then train the person wants like N2 or N1 right?
One of my bosses started as an intern to be trained from zero, they’re now… one of my bosses.
My cousin in law’s husband got hired from a different field, got sent to bootcamp and such. Now works contracts.
The catch is probably worse benefits, maybe not the best job or position or specific field. This is if it’s not a scam, or shitty contract stuff, etc..
It will be “haken” kaisha only seems
arent all the red flags and bells ringing as you read it?
23 comments
Got any details of this job?
If you are currently an ALT, what have you go to lose?
If you mean an IT support call center, yes they train you because it’s expected.
There are jobs like this. The “catch” really depends on company. It might be a good workplace with experienced senior programmers that just can’t find enough people, or it might be a rubbish place with a revolving door of employees and exploitative bosses. The only thing that’s certain is it’s not going to be among the most attractive or selective companies, but it might be a good way to get a foot into the industry.
Simply based on that alone, no it is not a scam. It might be a scam, but it isn’t a scam because they claim to train new hires from zero.
It was/is actually a common practice in traditional Japanese tech companies (and traditional Japanese companies in general). Companies hire people regardless of their experience, and then put them under a mentor who is meant to teach them everything they need to know to do their job.
That having been said, these types of places tend to be stuck in the past in more ways than one. They tend to never update their stack, because their engineers never have much knowledge outside of what is already known/used within the company. This was kind of okay 20 years ago? But these days technology is advacning so fast it is a formula for failure.
It is also common at SES (System Engineering Service) based companies. SES companies primarily offer their services to other companies who need some kind of tech related services done: maintain an old website, add a feature to an existing website, etc. They are outsourced to from other companies that don’t have their own employees for their tech needs.
SES companies don’t generally just deal in a particular stack or technology, they tend to do whatever is asked of them, and many will put you on a job regardless of whether or not you actually have applicable experience and expect you to learn on the job.
There is an image in a lot of traditional Japanese companies that programming is unskilled labor that doesn’t take a lot of creativity, and a lot of traditional Japanese companies offer salaries based on that expectation.
This is common to hire new Japanese graduates who have 0 experience with IT or no degree in IT and train them in Japan, however it’s rare to hire a person from abroad without IT skills(degree in IT).
Technically my job advertised “no experience necessary. 12 months training provided”. It’s been ok so far. Not much actual training though, more sink or swim.
I have worked at a company like that for 2 years, and have met many people who have as well (in different companies of the same type)
It is a great stepping stone to get further into an IT career from 0, however prepare to be worked and squished to the last of your ability, as they really leverage the education they are giving you with the workload. It can be pretty spartan, but you’ll get to participate in cert seminars for free, and usually get the cert exams paid for.
Just know you’ll be required to pass something akin to a CCNA within one year, or half a year, from joining the company, and then constantly get new certification to make yourself available to a wider range of work the company is seeking out. Passed Security+ just by studying, with almost no actual work security experience? Great, go and do this major firewall migration project for a MAJOR Japanese company next month. You’re quite low in the outsourcing(contracting?) chain as well, so prepare to be pressured by the 3-4 companies outsourcing to you above as well.
After getting some workable skills, you either get put into the project mill inside the company, or are sent out to a partner (usually much bigger) company as helpdesk/sysadmin helper/project engineer. etc
Like I said, you most probably will be expected to work the full 40 a week + 30 or more overtime a month, but it is an amazing opportunity to get something from nothing if you’re willing to put up with it for 2 years or so. It’s how I went from 0 education (HS graduate), work history and marketable skills besides English and Japanese to main system/cybersecurity admin at a gaishikei in 3 years.
EDIT:Seeing the other comments in here, I seem to have been quite lucky with my enviroment regarding growth (even though it still was Black and cheap as hell). Guess you won’t learn much if you’re just doing enough to get by, in my case I caught my bug for fascination with cybersecurity and went above and beyond with studying and testing, which might have given me a better result. The companies often don’t mind if you basically start living in them, and use their testing equipment, so I took the opportunity to learn and experiment hands-on with some really expensive firewalls, routers and switches you would otherwise have to simulate.
Just watch out for fake job scams. They can even set up fake Linkedin profiles and fake company websites. If they ask you for money upfront for admin, or they send you “funds” to “buy equipment”, run away!
Yes. They won’t. Sometime they outright lie, sometime they put out posting through company like エン転職 or Mynavi and the PIC just write whatever to get more applicants.
I worked for 1 tech IT company (which turns out to be 客先常駐 which if you don’t know is haken but with tiny bit of job stability).
They told me they would train me before I graduate and enter their company blah blah blah only to made me do 海外人材紹介 cause I *already* have experience with that they said. I can switch to IT but then I have to *train myself*
Got out of that but since I didn’t (still don’t) have any coding knowledge I stick with a desk job. But 外資 so at least the pay is good.
One IT (also 客先常駐) directly told me they would gladly take me in if I promise to do everything they ask (zangyo and all) and work like a dog since I “don’t get the rights to be picky when I quitted my first job after only 6 months.”
>Only planning to work at a place like this until I can go somewhere better.
So I’ve worked in IT for a long time and also been in charge of hiring people to various extents.
IF you are lucky enough to find one of these companies that “claims” to train you from 0 to engineer and actually gives you a decent education than sure its a decent stepping stone. The problem is; that rarely happens.
As other people have mentioned, you will be worked to the bone and won’t have time to learn things apart from what you’re required to work on ( which will be old tech stacks).
On top of that, unless you really buckle down on studying yourself and can prove you know what you’re talking about, most large decent tech firms in Japan won’t hire you. Because you haven’t really learned. You’ve learned to do the task they’ve given you, but you won’t become a decent developer will a deep knowledge about the topics on hand.
So my advice is always, don’t bother. 9/10 you just waste a few years and have nothing to gain for it. You’d be better off studying with that time.
Just to put this out there as well, a few years at a company like that means you’re still a junior developer at best. The industry in Japan (the jobs with good salaries) aren’t interested in junior developers. The industry needs Middle/Senior and up.
This is actually quite common from where I came from. I used to work at a oursourcing company that frequently hired people from language schools and train them for dispatch position.
The result is usually mixed. Some people manage to craft out a nice career as developers, some move to PM or BridgeSE roles, some even move to sales. And a non neglible numbers fail to make it in Japan and return home.
In some cases they even pay part of the language school fee, and in exchange the new guys will have to work for them at least 2 or 3 years, or pay the money back. Although I know of more than one case that quit before that and never paid anything back.
I’m likely the outlier here with my experience but I personally work one of these IT training jobs with no IT experience (but have JLPT N1/no issues communicating in Japanese). I have no overtime and I’ve been studying for about 5 months so far, and they put me on the 2-3 month long new hire training starting this April with the fresh out of uni people. My company basically paid me to get certs and covered the fees as well. It’s a pretty comfortable gig but I think I just landed an especially nice company and got lucky
I have worked in companies like this. For japanese employees with 0 experience, some times without even a college degree, they had the first few months learning useful skills like cloud, network, java, etc. And then they would be outsourced to the client. I think people who had 0 experience couldn’t choose an area so you could end up having to move to the other side of the country.
For foreign employees they only hired people with previous experience so we couldn’t participate in these trainings, but they did pay for certifications and had online courses. I used that to get a certification myself.
I took a job like this. Not in the IT part but for programming. I’m an in-house system engineer for a small company that receives outsourced projects. They trained me for 6 months where I basically sat with programming textbooks and did the MOOC.fi java course and practice projects. After 6 months, I began working on a real project. That’s finished and now on another study period for like a month to learn C#. Honestly my work isn’t bad at all, low pressure, supportive coworkers, it’s just the salary and work hours are long (16万, and will probably barely increase). But I’m improving my tech skills and Japanese everyday, so it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for now.
The ones you see regularly on indeed etc?
Its legit but there is a slight catch.
They’ll have you do some other type of menial work while they train you. Most of the time its working in a call centre or as a sales person somewhere while you study in your own time or time set aside by the company. Then after you complete the training they’ll dispatch you to a company that needs whatever skill you learned.
It’s going to be really hard to place you into one of the call centre/sales jobs if you aren’t a native Japanese speaker so must companies will pass on you unless you have enough IT skills NOW to place you in a low level IT position.
Pay is low and training probably wont be the best, but its a step into the right direction if you want out of Ekaiwa/ALT.
It means you’re gonna spend all day answering phone calls and managing tens of shared excel files at once. While being bombarded with work culture manners and rituals like meetings, reports, etc.
In our company they just tell you to get LPIC or CCNA asap. They have some lame video courses on a local portal that no one uses. Everyone just grinds practice tests on Ping-t website until they get 100% and that’s it.
The company doesn’t even provide a paid account there, or any other platforms like udemy, linkedin, etc. You’re on your own basically.
Pray it’s not a dispatch company. They’ll handle you to some lame client that needs an english “bridge” to their overseas branch that has several stalled projects which will all be on you when you join. Or just send you to glue some stickers on boxes in some warehouse in inaka.
I dunno how bad it is compared to being an alt since I’m not a native speaker but you can simply use it as a stepping stone to get some certs so you could get a foot in a door of a better company. Dunno if all the stress and pressure you get there worth it though..
This is a wonderful opportunity
No IT company wants people without experience. If a company is willing to pay you to train there. Absolutely accept it.
After 1-2 years you’ll be getting calls from recruiters left, right & center. (Make a LinkedIn profile)
Um how old are you OP?
If you are still in the late 20s then yes maybe you can learn something, but be ready to jump ship when it is obviously you are no longer learning anything new.
Unless it is a big company, there is a high chance that what they say they will “teach” is merely up to the task they needed you to do, not something that can help you make a 180 degree career change to become a full developer. It is highly likely you have to study on your own during your free time.
Worse, most of the time these tend to be just sweat shops (Black Company) with significant unpaid overtime and super cheap salary. What they claim to “train” is quite often a honeypot to attract unaware workers.
I assume any company that wants to hire and then train the person wants like N2 or N1 right?
One of my bosses started as an intern to be trained from zero, they’re now… one of my bosses.
My cousin in law’s husband got hired from a different field, got sent to bootcamp and such. Now works contracts.
The catch is probably worse benefits, maybe not the best job or position or specific field. This is if it’s not a scam, or shitty contract stuff, etc..
It will be “haken” kaisha only seems
arent all the red flags and bells ringing as you read it?