Blogs and Articles from Third Way Forum Membrs

・ Traditionally, career goals of almost everybody was to feed their family members. For that purpose, people wanted to get promoted for better salary and benefits.

・ In old days, there was not so much scrutiny about senior managers of the company. They could play a lot of golf, Karaoke with clients and a lot of wining and dining often with a young secretary etc. People obeyed them and worked for them as they were indeed seen as big bosses and they did seem to have a lot of benefits. So many people wanted to become big bosses themselves. However, in today’s world, senior managers need to think about compliance, harassment issues and tight cost management etc under much stronger public scrutiny. Quite often they don’t have enough head count so they are overloaded with workload, stressed out and tired. Being a senior manager seems to mean that you will get a lot more responsibility and not so much extra benefits. That’s why people are not so much excited about getting promoted. They would rather be less responsible and less burdened.

・ In Japan, it seems more people would rather choose to work under their true capability and are very happy about it. Even if they are encouraged to take a higher role, they reject by saying that they really don’t want it. One of the explanation could be that they would be rather be safe to secure their solid performance than taking a risk of overstretching their bandwidth. Another reason could be they are just happy to spend the extra time and energy outside work such as raising children or enjoying hobbies.

・ For some Japanese people, it seems their career goal is not to work at all by winning a lottery! It seems they know from what they want to be free, but they still don’t know for what they want to be free. Many people don’t want to continue to work as salary men or salary women. They must clarify what they really want to do after they stop working as a salary man. “Freedom for what” needs to be clarified. If they don’t know it yet, they should rediscover themselves first before changing the job.

・ In Japan, most Japanese employees always accept the relocation assignment request from their companies unconditionally without discussion. If there is a gap between the company needs and the individual needs, individual needs are often sacrificed or compromised. Japanese companies should encourage more open communications about assignment of their employees. Japanese employees may be obedient and easy to manage so far, but from now on there will be a lot of international employees as well and young Japanese people also tend to prioritize their private life. Without open communication and two-way dialogue, assignment and relocation of employees will be much more difficult in Japan.

・ More and more young Japanese people no longer see climbing up the ladder in the same company as generalists as their career goals. They would rather develop themselves in a chosen profession to be more valuable in the market. That is their major career goal.