Blogs and Articles from Third Way Forum Membrs

・ In the West, students apply for a real job. The assumption is that, despite their lack of experience, students try to get a job which they studied for or was trained for at school and they know what they want to do fairly clearly upon graduating from school.

・ In Japan, students apply for a company not for a job. The assumption is that students are not trained and don’t know what they want to do upon graduating from school. Therefore, companies try to mould them by giving a series of wide-range of assignments regardless of the subjects of their study. In this way, they will be someone useful for the company as a widely-experienced generalist in the company that can stay employed for a long time.

・ However, this indoctrination approach, almost like a welfare state system provided by company, does not work any more as the life-long employment is over. With no job safety and stability of employment, companies can not ask for unlimited loyalty from employees any more. However, in reality, still there are many older Japanese leaders who are arrogant enough to assume that their companies are big brands and students all want to join them on a waiting list. Also, there are still some students who are traditionally educated, risk-averse and willing to join an old established Japanese company, hoping to get some stability. Therefore, this unhealthy corporate behavior of one-sidedly assigning people still prevails in Japan.

・ For mid-career hires, the situation is much better. There is an open position with a specific job description and a price tag. A person applies for the job based on his strength, talent and career aspiration. Also, the selection process is conducted based on the matching of the demand of the job and what the person can supply. So mid-career hires have no major issues. The big issue is the majority of employees who were hired as New Grads and developed as generalists in one company. They are still assigned around from one department to another for internal coordination needs. These are the people who are need to be reexamined whether or not they could be reassigned based on their strength and aspiration (get the right seat on the bus!) in order to deliver more value.

・ Most global companies always have and also some Japanese companies have also started the internal job posting practice. In this way, employees can see what other jobs are available within the company and can apply based on their strength and career aspiration. When you do the internal job posting, the major question is always which has the final say in it, the employee who is applying for an open position or the employee’s manager? Many managers do not want their talented people to go to another department so they may want to discourage their subordinate to apply for other available jobs. In order to prevent this possible sabotage by managers, it is advisable to make it a rule that individual employee’s aspiration should be prioritized over the manager’s voice. So if the person who applied gets the job, the manager must let the person go to the new job.

・ Many Japanese companies still do not have even have a career discussion forum. As the first step, it is important that there is a forum where employees can share their career aspirations and discuss future opportunities with their managers.

・ As a possible solution to help Japanese companies to assign people more properly based on their talent, companies should stop hiring a certain number of new grads as “new grads”. They should instead hire young professionals for specific jobs and they may happen to be new grads. As long as companies keep hiring new grads as a quota without any specific jobs upfront, they will continue to assign new grads to some junior roles in the field and start rotating them around over years.

・ If companies stop this practice and start demanding much higher skills and expertise up front and hire new grads for specific jobs rather than just as a quota, students have to be prepared totally differently at universities. They will think more in earnest what they want to do and what skills they want to harness etc. As the saying goes, “if you don’t decide for yourself, someone else does for you.” If students want to find their own path to success, they should decide for themselves rather than blindly joining a company as a number and then being assigned to whatever job the company feels like.