IT market in Japan

Hi,

I'm interested in finding work as an IT business analyst in japan.

However I don't speak any japanese. Would anyone see this as a major issue?

I would obviously try to learn japanese out there...

Does anyone have any experience/stories on the subject?

Additionally, would anyone know the best place to start looking for employment?

Thanks.

Ummmmm yeah, not being able to speak Japanese at work in Japan would be a pretty major issue.

I would say that your best chance (nothing certain) would be to find work in your current location and be transferred to Japan in the long-run.

Actually if you have a reasonable amount of experience in IT, your chances are probably quite good- in IT jobs not speaking Japanese isn't the issue a lot of people think it is, in Tokyo at least. My husband (Japanese) works as an IT business analyst here in Tokyo for a foreign insurance company- he was previously at another well-known American IT company's Tokyo headquarters, and I have met a lot of his co-workers. The majority of the non-Japanese he has worked with didn't speak much Japanese at all, which didn't matter because the working language of many foreign companies with offices here is English.

There has been a big influx of Indian IT people in the last few years- very few of them speak much Japanese when they arrive.

Examples of companies with English as the working language which recruit non-Japanese are Microsoft, HP, American Express, Cisco Systems and many others.

There is always demand for new employees in IT because the turnover is relatively high- there is a lot of job mobility and also people moving back to their home country.

The people I know working in IT got their jobs through recruitment agencies like Robert Half, Robert Walters, Michael Page, Panache etc.

It helps a lot to actually be in Japan, so a few of the IT people I know came here and worked as English teachers for a few months so they had their visas already and were in the country to attend interviews. Being recruited from overseas is a lot harder.

Obviously the more Japanese you learn, the easier life will be here and the more the job market will open up for you.

It seems that if you are in/around Tokyo your chances would be a lot higher. Outside of Tokyo, it gets very difficult to find IT jobs if you are not native level Japanese.

When looking through job postings I see quite a few IT jobs in Tokyo that require little or no Japanese.

Thanks very much for the feedback.

I'll send my CV out to some agencies and see how I get on!