Starting a new job is an exciting and anxious moment. Even though there are a lot of things to learn and remember, people are filled with the feeling that they are able to create their own future when they start their jobs. This is particularly true at your first postgraduate job because that job has influence on all your later jobs as well.
In terms of your first career, the job hunt is one of the biggest issues for would-be graduate students not only in the United States, but especially in Japan. I am now a junior at a university in Tokyo (though I am studying here in Madison for now), and my first step toward job hunting starts in about four months. When I say job hunting, that means junior and senior students start finding interviews for full-time employment after graduation.
Japanese juniors and seniors face a lot of stress trying to find a job because they need to search for full-time employment long before graduation. It is much harder to find a job after graduating in Japan because companies want to hire the freshiest graduates available. Even a couple months after graduating, the job hunt becomes exponentially harder.
This custom increases stress on students still in college. According to the news report from NHK, Japan Broadcasting Corporation, the number of students who committed suicide due to failure to find a job has more than doubled in the last five years. This shows a serious problem that Japanese students have during the job hunt. They do not have many chances to build successful careers, other than getting jobs as new graduates. If they fail in that venture, they are sometimes unable to apply to some companies under the title “new graduates” anymore. I, as well as many other students, started to worry about getting the right job in my own field right out of college. Employers in Japan should see new graduates in the same way they see those still in college because our skillset is still fresh. We do not lose what we have learned in those few months out of college.
When we look at the recruiting system of new graduates in the United States, I am totally surprised that many students have not decided their jobs even though they are already senior students.
The New York Times wrote a story on a 2009 female college graduate who could not get a job in advertising. Eventually she decided to work as a manager of a bar and do media relations for Austin Pets Alive! as a volunteer. Even though she likes that she can earn money and do advertising at the same time, she is still applying to graduate school to make her resume more appealing.
There is a difference in mentality between Japanese and American graduates. Japanese graduates see it as a failure to not get a job in their field immediately following graduation. American students, however, see nonpaying jobs in their fields as successful. Thus, Japanese students have no choice but to go nuts when finding a job. They try their best to be successful in all their interviews, and that sometimes puts too much pressure on them, which is only exasperated when they fail.
What happens when only focusing on finding a job is that the number of Japanese students who study abroad decreases—they care about how easily they can earn credits so that they are not struggling to fit in extra classes toward the end of their degree. If Japan also allows students to enjoy career flexibility the way America does, all of these problems will be solved.
It is hard to change the customs that are already so pronounced in a culture. Japanese culture has accepted a stance which actually standardizes people by making one royal road to prosperity and rejecting other possibilities at the same time.
Japanese students need some other possibilities to be successful in their careers other than heavily relying on the current method of graduate employment.
Do you agree with Yukako’s stance on post collegiate employment? Is there some point she may have overlooked? We would like to hear your view. Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
