-Hi! Extra info added. I am not a teacher. I moved away from ALT/teaching work about three years ago. I have N1 as well, so the study encouragement is appreciated, but the JLPT isn’t particularly on the radar anymore. Just looking for experiences on how others changed fields and found new job paths. Thanks!
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Hi, it’s me, another depressed and burned out foreigner.
I tried searching through the Reddit but most of the experiences seemed to be about teaching yourself to code and getting a programming job. Or starting an eikaiwa of your own. But generally seemed to be with the big footnote of *oh yeah I’m married to a citizen by the way so they supported me and we figured out*.
For those of us not so lucky to be enjoying matrimonial bliss with a side of spousal visa backup plan or somehow having the savings to just support yourself while you learn a new skill (not a bad option, but not on the table for me just yet): I was wondering if anyone had advice on where to start or experiences regarding changing careers entirely. Did you go to school here? Did you go to hello work? Did you find a job that seemed interesting and just applied and gave it a shot?
Thanks.
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I didn’t change careers, but changing careers in Japan is the same as changing careers anywhere: You need to get marketable skills. Obviously, get good at Japanese. The better you are at Japanese, the more employable you become. Sure, you can get a job with little Japanese, or with N2, but the options available grow exponentially when you remove that crutch.
Next, it is extremely challenging to move into a new industry if you don’t have applicable and transferable experience or skills. You should be doing this while you’re still teaching. Do a certificate, or another degree, or an advanced degree, or otherwise learn the skills you need for your target industry in your free time. Yeah, you’ll be tired because you’re working a soul sucking ALT/eikaiwa job and nobody wants to spend hours every day before/after work studying. But, if you want to get out of the industry, that’s how you do it.
So, step one: Figure out what you want to do. Step two: figure out what kind of skills you need for that industry. Step three: get those skills.
I don’t have the spousal visa privilege but I am working on my PR (already applied, waiting for result). I was burned out and depressed too. But I couldn’t think of any other career path that would suit me. I am not a native English speaker, so I cannot teach English. I have never learned how to code, but I was (still am) pretty sure that I’d hate it or maybe I’d like it but I would not be a good software engineer.
What I did was just change my job. Same industry but better pay and better working hours. I got lucky that the new job has a good working environment and it really helps to ease my mental burden. I know that applying for jobs when you’re burned out is mentally taxing, but you should try and hopefully you’ll find something that you like.
Three issues: Visa, industry, education.
Years past until about last year, you could learn programming in your free time or take a bootcamp over months/years while working and get a job. Nowadays with positions lessening as the boom died off, junior programmer intake has gotten strained and market is overloaded. You gotta have golden fingers to get in now.
Sure there are jobs out there that you can into without specific degrees or certs or training, but that’s like sales or recruiting and those take on other skills like Japanese and social skills.
Aside from that, the ‘going to school’ route either works as overseas schooling online (which you’ll have to work here to stay here) or in-country schooling and hop on a student visa. But universities that have proper English taught programs can be hard to get into, and degrees can be not very marketable or even not worthwhile for Japan.
Me? I went back home, learned programming (which I do like) with full freedom of my home country, and came back to Japan.
I want to say something encouraging, but this is going to be more a FWIW…
My first rule is: where and how do you want to compete? Is Japan really a good place to start or change a career as a foreigner? And as much as I love Japan for several reasons, IMHO, it just really isn’t a great market for us. So, I question – why Japan? Do you really need to be here? What is keeping you here?
My answer is: I left Japan. I got a good job in a company doing financial research in my country – the US. I knew people in Japan so I did eventually get a transfer because of the skills and proprietary knowledge I already had. I.e. I did not develop that in Japan. For me, if I didn’t get a transfer, I would have been happier in America. I would not trade a fulfilling career for Shinjuku as much as I love that place.
If you are absolutely committed to living here, I think the model I have seen work is the type of person who can do serious studies while working. I have a friend who is the type that got a CFA, a master’s and N1 (not all at the same time) while working a serious management job. But I am 100% not that personality type. I have to focus on 1 thing.
Wrt the coding idea, in general I recommend doing something where you are competent (or have aptitude), have a level of passion, and there is a need. Don’t do coding if you suck at it and don’t like it. Ultimately that will be self-defeating.
On a final note, IMHO, Japanese generally value language and cultural communication more than job skill. I really believe this. Take an exceptional worker who is sort of conversational in Japanese and take a Japanese or great speaker with really mediocre job skills and I can almost guarantee they will choose the latter to work with. So…you sort of need to get those language skills to a solid level. I say this as someone who has hired many people and I sit on a leadership team.
I really do wish you good luck.
I changed divisions internally, so while not a complete career overhaul, I did have to pass an internal interview process and the new job required skills not found in my prior position.
Part of the job description of the latter was marketing data analysis, i.e. tracking campaign CPM, advertisement CTR, customer journey analysis and all that. My previous position involved absolutely none.
Probably the only reason I got the new job is because I ran a website in college and started using Google Analytics and AdSense basically as soon as both products launched.
For some reason, people that know anything about google analytics are extraordinarily rare in Japan. I sort of thought it would be a fundamental requirement for anyone working in online marketing here, but instead companies like mine regularly pay “Analytics Specialists” hundreds of thousands of yen every month just to have them run some GA or Hootsuite reports and put the numbers in a PowerPoint. Meanwhile, anyone that’s been on the internet pre-Instagram can probably knock out something like the Google Analytics Certification in a day or two.
So essentially I was falling back on skills I started to develop long before even moving to Japan. Which happened to be rare here. And also being able to do it in Japanese.
What are you doing with your spare time? Sometimes you can rely on soft skills and meet someone who trusts you enough to learn as you go. “Fake it till you make it” is real to some extent, so long as you’re not faking being a heart surgeon or something.
I was your average eikaiwa teacher, slowly getting fed up of my job, and then I was introduced, via a colleague, to a guy who worked for a sort of advertising agency which was looking for someone to write articles (and proofread articles written by non-native speakers). That was my “way in”, as when we later moved away from that area (thus letting me quit the eikaiwa job), I was able to use that experience to get jobs in that new field. I had a spouse visa at the time, but my wife was busy enough with her own job, so (and I say this as a statement of fact, not of arrogance) I did it essentially by myself.
I don’t know where you look for jobs, but search for part time stuff involving – well, anything that’s not teaching and which looks interesting. Get your foot on the first rung of the ladder. If you have demonstrable skills in, for instance, proof-reading documents, writing good English copy, or spoken / written Japanese, these are all useful. Once you’ve got to that first stage, you can then parlay that into, for instance, a full time job.
It might take a lot of searching, but once you get the snowball rolling, so to speak, it should get a little easier.
I had no spousal visa. I continued my *eikaiwa* job while doing an MA, then continued teaching at university while doing a doctoral program and publishing. I was basically studying or going to school nights, weekends, and holidays for about 6 years. I got permanent residence along the way. I wasn’t married.
If you have excellent communication skills (written and spoken) and proficiency in Japanese, an alternative career path is to look at international law firms. A few will hire business development and marketing specialists, proofreaders, document specialists etc.
International law firms have decent perks, good salary, most operate on full English basis. However, if you’re burnt out then a demanding law firm environment may not be for you.
Look at your home country and what cheap online degrees you can get part time while working? If you’re not sure what you wanna do maybe look for a decent online MBA and try getting your JLPT score up.
Eikaiwa/ALT work is designed to be a two year experience. If you don’t have a spouse visa your only real choices are grind it out until they give you PR or go home. Learning Japanese isn’t a job skill and won’t get you a better job alone. Also, this is Japan. They still believe a person should only have one profession. The longer you do something, the harder it will be to get out.
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So, yea. For you it’s go home or grind it out till you get PR move into blue collar work.
Are you interested in sales or foreign trade? I switched from Eikaiwa to foreign trade and there seems to be a shortage of this kind of worker in Japan. There are tons of trade firms looking for people to do their overseas sales.
I became interested in data science and business analytics around 2018. Started self-studying in my spare time, got promoted to a full-time supervisor position at my eikaiwa, did some data analytics projects there when I wasn’t teaching, applied for dozens and dozens of data positions, no interview offers, made a LinkedIn, practiced and studied a lot more, applied for dozens more positions, still no bites, started posting some data visualization stuff online, applied for dozens more positions, got one interview thanks to a dashboard I had posted on LinkedIn, completely bombed it, my eikaiwa offered redundancy to full-time employees, so I jumped at the chance and used the severance to do the Data Science course at Le Wagon. Kept applying while doing the course and got an offer before it was finished.
Working as an analyst in supply chain now. Much more fulfilling, interesting, more room for growth, and much better pay. In the data field AI and ML is getting a ton of attention these days, but there seems to be a lack of people with basic SQL, Python and Excel skills to pull, transform and validate data as needed, including for those fancy massive data models all the PhDs are busy putting together.