About employment in Japan

What is Job-type Employment

Job-type employment refers to regular employees or fixed-term employment contract work, where you can make use of the knowledge, experiences and specialized skills you have learned, and choose the working content and working location you like. The salary is determined by your ability and experience. As long as you have the ability to get your job well done, you’ll get the chance to do important work, even if you are young. On the other hand, there’s almost no training in the company, and you need to master the skills all by yourself.

What is Membership-type Employment

Membership-type employment is one of the most common employment contracts in Japanese companies. It is based on the systems such as “Nenko-Jyoretsu*(seniority-wage system)” and “shushin koyo*(lifetime employment)” that are unique to Japan. It refers to non-regular employees who don’t have limited duty and working location. In this membership-type employment, a large amount of talents are acquired mainly by hiring many fresh graduates all at once, and then organizing OJT (short for “On the Job Training”) and interior further education to accumulate knowledge and experiences necessary to the job. Since the duty and working location is not limited, basically job transfers or department transfers might be made according to company's conditions, which is the feature of this employment. It is a Japanese-style employment that is quite common in large listed companies, and it is also a form of employment that is often seen in “regular positions”.
As for Japanese companies, there are still many of them adopting "membership-type employment", so the job hunting after graduation is very important. Before you make a choice, you need to consider the company and occupation that may be involved in your whole life.

* What is seniority-wage systemSeniority-wage system is a personnel system in which one’s years of service and age are highly valued, and his or her position and salary would rise with the increase of these two things. In the past, almost all Japanese companies adopted this "seniority-wage system ". In recent years, more and more companies have introduced "performance-based system", where it’s not unusual to transfer, and people who have done well in work would get ahead regardless of their years of service or ages. Even so, “seniority-wage system” remains deeply rooted in Japanese companies.

* What is Shushin KoyoShushin Koyo is a system that people are employed by one company for a long time from their graduation to retirement age (60 ~ 65 years old * depending on the company). Some say that this system has become weaker in recent years, but in fact, it remains entrenched. In other words, there are still many cases where people work in the initial company they entered until their retirement age, so, it can be said that there are fewer limits in hiring experienced than hiring new graduates. For this reason, in Japan, job hunting is especially important to “new graduates”.