I want to hear people’s perspective on my situation.
English is my second language, apologies for bad grammer in advance.
Background: Asian M24 with 3YOE (2 years in my home country and a year in Japan) in Web Development.
Permanent employee in the Japanese Haken company and working in another company as a contractor employee.
Language Skill: My native language, English and Japanese (N2)
Salary: 3M annualy + 50K JPY per a year as bonus. (yeah not so great)
Visa: Engineer/Specialist
So I made contact with Robert Malters, and they introduced me to two positions at their biggest client (company name that starts with ‘R’)
First position: Project Manager, 6-7M JPY
Second position: Web Developer, no salary range given, whole process with only 1 interview.
Additional note:
・My visa is going to expire next January, and Robert Walter’s recruiter told me that they can support it.
・If I resign from my current employer, I have to pay around 80k JPY, and it will be half by next year (cost of travel fee when came to Japan)
・The contract period of the client company is 3 months. It will be over by the end of October, then it will extend by 3 months again, and so on.
Questions:
1) Should I wait untill my current employer to extend my visa?
2) Whats your thoughts on Robert Walters?
3) Should I stay in my current position until| I get more experience?!
Thank you for taking the time to read my questions.
6 comments
If I understand correctly, it sounds to me like January is your sweet spot for changing jobs. Your penalty is halved from 80K -> 40K, and you’d still have visa coverage.
Whether you choose PM or web developer role would depend on whether you want to become a PM, and how much the webdev role pays. Switching seems like a no brainer though.
For your situation Rakuten seems like a decent step up. Earlier is better I would say.
As a web developer working for Rakuten is great if you got a permanent position, otherwise PM is not so because it can be very stressful and *Middle Manager role* which means you are out of union protection so sometimes unpaid working is asked
I want to highlight something for you on the money side of things (obviously you should consider everything else too, not just the money, but I think this is something that might not be obvious you should keep in mind).
With the amount you’re getting paid now, vs the amount you could get offered, you basically shouldn’t care about the 80k penalty. Even if you got offered the low end of 6M, that would still be an increase in salary of 6M – 3.05M = 2.95M yen per year. Divide that by 12 and you get just over 240k extra yen per month.
Now think if you quit early and had to pay up the 80k penalty. By the time you get your first paycheck at your next company, you’ll already be up 240k – 80k = 160k. This is 160k yen **more** than what you would be making at your current job, without having to pay the 80k penalty. And after that first month you would be making at least the full 240k more every month (I say **at least** because it’s likely you’ll get a raise every 6 or 12 months, based on your new higher base salary so even more money than you would otherwise be making in your current situation).
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Again, make sure you consider all the other factors too, as there’s a lot more to life than just money. Just keep in mind that the penalty shouldn’t really be holding you back when you’re already paid so much less than market rate.
Take the money.
Change jobs a year later again.
Also, there’s a third way: at your current pay, you can find plenty of other offers 😘
3m in web is horrible. It was great for you to put your foot in the door but you deserve so much more as the recruiter showed you already and you should get it quite easily.
Research a bit on that R company because I have heard weird things about it. Also you can apply to dozens of companies and through different agents if you want. No need to take the first result
Good luck