Hi good afternoon to everyone,
I lived in Japan for 4 years (language school and Junior College), worked for 7 months in a company related to video shooting and last year in September after leaving the job, I decided to go back to my home country (Spain) with my now wife (Japanese), to stay sometime with my family.While working in Japan, I started to study a little bit of web development (HTML and CSS).
When I stayed in Spain I continued self-studying web development, and I was supposed to go to school to study Web Development (Junior College). But before enrolling I applied for some jobs related to IT(システムエンジニア) in Japan, and as I got 3 offers I decided to go back to Japan and see if could do the job.
Fast-forward 7 months and I am working in a company as a システムエンジニア but without doing anything related (Translating documents from Japanese to English / Spanish, writing blog entries in the company’s website, preparing the Meishi cards for the employers and writing some Powerpoints and excel files).
I wanted to work in IT or in a job related to programming but, without any certification and no job experience programming (because although my job position says システムエンジニア, all I do is office related tasks), I wanted to ask the people of reddit if it would be better for me to go back to my home country and try again to go to school and get some certifications or If I try changing the job would give me any chance to find a real IT related work.
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Background: 26 years old Male (Spanish), married to Japanese spouse with a Junior College degree in Media Studies and a Bachelor Degree in International Business.
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Have a nice day!
Edit: When I was talking about IT, I did not mean Helpdesk or Network roles, but instead of web development, software development jobs.
Sorry for the miscommunication!
5 comments
Where are you happiest?
Since you’re married to a Japanese national, you can get a spouse visa and do as you wish. So either Spain or Japan are open to you.
Certs and degrees for webdev doesn’t help much, tbh. Only one worth much is AWS, but no one who wants to keep their database is going to hire a junior devops dev. A degree will take more time and money than what you can do on your own, and it honestly doesn’t look better than the next guy.
So to me, it’s more of a question of, “Where should I self study?” and the answer to that question is: The place that gives you the greatest opportunity to do so.
And yes, you can self-learn and get into webdev. I did, many of my friends did, while working busy jobs, while tending to their kids, while doing whatever.
Hi mate,
You need to understand that IT and programmation aren’t the same job. System engineer is infrastructure role
First you need to decide wether you want to do infra/networking or dev but as you said already you are more looking to become a web dev.
As it seems your Japanese should be on point you will easily find a junior web dev job with some basic skills in a Japanese company, just keep studying at home, build a portefolio and apply.
good thing with software dev/software eng/programming/coders/etc roles is that is one of the professions with easy barrier to entry and in high demand (that’s why you have a ton of bootcamps and online courses), try to leverage your current role to find another one closer to software engineering, best companies in japan to wrok for would be probably foreign ones (in terms of pay and wlb) but there’s a ton more companies that might pay less but ould still offer a better opportunity to your current role
My suggestion is to focus on 2 areas, AI and Quantum Computing. From what I tried to glean from all you wrote, you are an IT generalist.
Next round of your inquiry, you need to give us an idea of how you are hunting for work in Japan (eg Tokyo, Kansai, Kyushuu?) and what level of skill and salary range you are at. Then, someone can make a useful answer to help you find work here. For example, web dev in Spain makes what? 5-20M JPY per year? It is a big spread. Full time or contractor, or own business? All these questions need to be considered and vetted before asking a general shotgun inquiry.
Narrow these questions down and one of us can help you out. Probably best to contact several recruiters here (google is your friend) and go from there.