I am currently a sophomore in college and looking to move to Japan out of college, give or take a few years. What would I need to do in order to prepare/ what would be possible career paths other than English teacher. I haven’t but I am trying to learn Japanese.
4 comments
This is a copy of your post for archive/search purposes.
—
**Graduating with a bachelors in accounting, masters in business admin, with a minor in homeland security.**
I am currently a sophomore in college and looking to move to Japan out of college, give or take a few years. What would I need to do in order to prepare/ what would be possible career paths other than English teacher. I haven’t but I am trying to learn Japanese.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/movingtojapan) if you have any questions or concerns.*
If you’re not in IT (which you’re not), then your best bet is to absolutely cram Japanese to develop your language ability and, in the meantime, aim for a job with a Japanese company, or with a company that has an office in Japan.
As an example, I have friends who worked for Mitsui, Toyota and Mazda and who were transferred to Japan. I also have friends who worked for Bloomberg, Accenture, McKinsey, Morgan Stanley and UBS who all worked in Japan.
Relevantly for you, one of my friends did a Commerce (accounting) degree, got a job with Toyota near Nagoya at first, and then made the jump to a management consulting firm in Tokyo. His Japanese was very strong before he was employed by Toyota Japan.
Obviously, it’s not easy. It’s a lot of work and you have to be a high achiever, but it’s entirely possible.
To work in finance or business in general you need experience in your own country, judging by the homeland security you’re American so you also want a cpa because that goes a distance.
Japan has plenty of local graduates going into business and finance so you need to be able to differentiate yourself from them with experience and a designation. If you apply for a entry level job with no experience and no Japanese skill why would they ever hire you when the local will be less trouble?
The final piece of the puzzle is 100% fluency in Japanese at a business level. You need to be able to read and write complex language (legal) and be good enough to speak to clients. This will take you a significant amount of time and you will need to dedicate yourself to this.
For reference I have a decade of experience in finance including management experience and a cpa. Without fluent (business) language skills I couldn’t get a job. Firms who need English just use their foreign devisions to support the client (Deloitte etc).
Language ability and CPA??