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Need some advice/information for my future plan!

tyrie69

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20 Sep 2014
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Hi everyone,

I'm here because I need some information or advice about my future plan and I saw this forum contains a lot of people who give good information ^^.

I'm actually a 25 French guy with a master in information technology and one year and a half experience in my current company. My Japanese level is low, but my English isn't bad I think. Of course my native language is French.

I'm not sure if this will help or not, but I lived in Korea for one year.

So now I want to live and work in Japan and I need some advice and information about this. Is it better to find a job before or try to find it in Japan directly, what kind of visa is the best all those things in fact.

Feel free to give me all your advice or information about this and thank you a lot.

Edward.
 
With a degree in IT, I will assume you want a job in that field, too. That means you will need an engineering work visa. The way it works, you get hired first, then apply for the visa together.

Not sure how much Japanese you will need, but non-teaching jobs over here usually require quite a bit, and that means reading and writing, not just casual phrases in conversation. What you actually need will depend on the company. Foreign branches might require less, but there is no guarantee.

Obviously, if you are physically present, you stand a better chance of landing a job because you can attend interviews sooner. But you should choose a good time of year to come here. People don't usually hire year-round, and there are some really dead times of year (Dec-Jan).

Living in Korea for a year might be looked upon favorably, mostly because the experience would be viewed as contributing to reducing your culture shock (if that actually happened).

Just because you have a degree doesn't mean you will automatically be looked upon favorably. You still have to prove you have the language skills and the actual work skills/experience needed to beat out a Japanese person for the job.
 
Ok first thank you for your reply.

So if I understand it well my choices are getting a job in a foreign company or learn Japanese before coming.

Anyway the best solution here might be coming to japan and look for a job or learning japanese I guess.

I confess that I'm a little bit confused about what I have to do first for my plan.
 
Step 1. find a company where you want to work and find out their requirements (language and otherwise) for foreign employees.

Step 2. meet the requirements and then apply, or if you think you already do meet them, apply.

Step 3. go through the application/interview process and wait. if hired, file for your work visa.

In any case, start learning Japanese. You will benefit from it in daily life if not needed elsewhere.
 
Hello Tyrie 69,

You don't really have a plan yet, all you have is a dream of coming to Japan. It is a nice dream to have, but it is pretty easily fulfilled by buying a plane ticket and coming to Japan. If you want to live and work here, you will need to start doing some actual planning.

The relatively easy route is to come here as an English teacher. Some English conversation schools recruit from overseas. There is also the quasi-governmental route of the JET program, which you should be able to check out on line.

Coming here as a professional to use the experience or the degree you have from university is a much more challenging route as most corporations hire at a specific time (spring) and most of them do their hiring directly from the universities, and most are looking for native (or native-level) candidates. Some corporations hire mid-year, but again you face the language hurdle. You could come here on a tourist visa and put your name in to some head-hunting agencies, but without a high degree of Japanese you will be difficult to place.

As Glenski mentioned above, no matter which route you choose, the work visa comes after you get the job offer/contract. You do not first get the visa and then come to Japan to search for a job. Or, I should say, the Japanese government does not issue a work visa for people who wish to come to Japan to look for a job. They issue work visas for people who have secured a job contract and are arriving in Japan to work at that job.

Another option available to you might be a student visa: i.e. you come to Japan for the purpose of studying language or the arts at an accredited school and they help arrange your student visa. However the student visa doesn't allow you to work in Japan (or, it only allows you to work within limitations).

Some people come to Japan on a tourist visa, search for a job while here (usually an English teaching job) and then if they find one, they switch their visa from a tourist visa to a work visa. I would caution you that the immigration agents don't like it when people come here to look for work on a tourist visa. If they sense you are coming for the purpose of looking for a job, they could be uncooperative. I would also caution you that coming to Japan is kind of a short-term goal. It is not a career plan. It is not a strategy for building a stable and fulfilling life. Think about what your speciality is, and then think about what companies might allow you to pursue that speciality in Japan, and then go after them aggressively.
 
There is also the route of internships.

Getting a work visa to teach English (a second or foreign language itself to you) requires that you have many years (10?) of experience because you don't come from an anglophone country. Unless you have a very clear and definite plan for IT job hunting, I wouldn't actually recommend trying to get a teaching job just so you can be here and look for IT work. You'll spend so much time on the English job issue that you'll lose time in your own field. Just because you have an IT degree means nothing. Jobs in that field are a dime a dozen here, and you need skills, experience, and Japanese language ability. There's variation in what employers want, of course, but that's a fair generalization.
 
Ok thank you for those Informations.

In fact I haven't 10 years of experience and my English is far from perfect so teach English isn't a viable solution for me unfortunately.

I actually got a reply from a headhunter who search people in my field, so I will see after the first interview.

Anyway I will think about what you said and organize myself to start planning a real plan.
 
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