What jobs are most likely to find a good spot in Japan?

4 comments

1. This is a copy of your post for archive/search purposes.

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   **What jobs are most likely to find a good spot in Japan?**

   I recently graduated with an electrical engineering degree, but I’m currently looking into working as a civil engineer for Department of Transportation of Oregon.
   I’m also considering becoming a Data Analyst.
   With the transportation engineering job, if I got to Japan I’d need to see if I could get hired by a city or department of transportation. But how likely is something like that?
   From my current understanding my current presumption is all foreigners in Japan are either English teachers, working remote from a job in English that’s likely based in America or ambassadors.

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2. >if I got to Japan I’d need to see if I could get hired by a city or department of transportation.

   Most (but not all) government jobs require that you’ve passed the civil servant exam. Only citizens are able to sit for this exam. So if you wanted to work in your field you’d need to be looking at private sector work. It should go without saying that you’d need to be fluent in Japanese.

   >my current presumption is all foreigners in Japan are either English teachers, working remote from a job in English that’s likely based in America or ambassadors.

   English speaking foreigners are a minority of foreign residents here. That being said, if you’re a native English speaker getting a job in ALT or eikaiwa is relatively easy which is why you’re finding loads of information about that.

3. Foreigners who pass the N1 and speak fluent Japanese have a multitude of careers, from advertising, IT, sales, design, marketing, engineering, etc.

   The key is to not only be qualified, but to able to seamlessly communicate in Japanese with co-workers.

   Otherwise you are frankly too much of a burden on any company to hire you and sponsor your work visa, unless you possess some unique, award-winning skills like an elite athlete, musician, chef, model or actor etc.

4. I don‘t know anything about your line of work and I can‘t give you any advice on that, but your presumption is wrong. I‘ve perosonally known and met with foreigners who work in various industries like engineering, software development, translation, sales, marketing and PR, modeling, farming, fishing, retail, electrician, truck and bus driving, hotel industry, various fields of academia and much more. It‘s actually impossible for me to list all jobs and sectors where I ecountered foreign workers. That being said, you are probably only looking around English speaking wesbites and forum because you probably don‘t speak Japanese. If you only speak English, you‘re options will be limited to English teaching or IT (if you have the necessary degree or experience), all the other jobs will require N2 minimum. There are some blue color jobs where you can get away with N3 or even N4 Japanese, but these are jobs with usually really bad conditions that only want to exploit cheap foreign labor.

   But yeah, that‘s just to explain the basics. If I go back to your topic I can‘t really help you, because I‘ve never met a foreign civil engineer in Japan, but from a bit of googling I found this thread, where someone claims to work as civil engineer in Japan and according to them N2 and a degree from a legit university should be enough.

   https://www.japan-guide.com/forum/quereadisplay.html?0+174506

   If I were you I would get some experience in your home country first and learn Japanese to a N2 level. Once you can show that you have experience in your field and speak Japanese, you‘ll probably be able to land a job.