Fresh graduate . I mean those who graduate from school in March and joined the work force. Everyone start work from this 1st Apr. In Japan, company hires fresh graduate. The fight for getting good university students , or student to get into the desired company starts a year ago.. So the one who started to work on 1st Apr has been approaching the company from 1st Mar. 2023.
Why company fight for good students ? Fresh graduate don’t have any skill, company do not know if they can perform the task.
The system here is, hiring good students who seems to be able to fit into the company’s culture and educate and train from the scratch. So human resource or people management department is really busy to visit universities, attend job fair, organising the briefing sessions, look through the applications and number of interviews. My friedn who is in charge of new graduate hiring has KPI like no of applications he needs to receive every month, no of interviews he needs to set and so on.
So most of new graduates will chose company to join and not the position they want to work for. It is not for the skill development but for the company which will provide the good salary , good environment, carrier opportunities and trustworthy.. to be able to provide the roof over you till you retire.
Once new graduates joon the company, Company will provide the trainings. It is to educate the company culture, system, business manner (you are no longer a student !) and company’s business for new graduates to familiarise and change the mindset to be responsible person in the society. The length of training can be one day to several month or as long as one year. After that, new graduates will be finally posted to the department.
The training session also serve for bonding of new graduates themselves. They will be close friends, or buddy to help each other even they are posted to different department.
Does eveyone in Japan work for one company for entire life ?
In below chart, line graph represent % of mid carrier job changer/mid carrier job seeker. In 2022, it was about 31% and we can tell Covid environment made job seeker difficult to succeed in changing the job. The bar graph shows the no of mid carrier job seeker (dark blue) and mid carrier job changer (light blue) . Mid carrier job seeker is getting more.
Chart : MHLW 2023 Analysis of Labour Economics, 厚生労働省資料より 令 和 ５ 年 版 労 働 経 済 の 分 析、令和5年9月発表 https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/12602000/001149098.pdf
Traditionally, company has the system like supporting the employee’s entire life like insurance for family, support housing with allowance or housing loan with better interest rate and also with retirement funds. Thus, people tend to look for company to work than position to work. Example, I would like to work for Toyota and it is not I would like to work as an engineer. Of course there were certain percentage of people who look for the position but not much because you will not know which position you will be posted once you join the company.
So, people have been able to live a stable life without big concern over the roof.
Is the Japanese company still providing such system ? People are still finding a good life in working for one company in entire life ?
Nobishiro by Maruko 
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