{"id":3,"date":"2004-07-03T18:46:46","date_gmt":"2004-07-03T08:46:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.localguy.com\/japan\/work-in-japan\/find-a-job\/my-story\/"},"modified":"2005-07-08T09:57:48","modified_gmt":"2005-07-07T23:57:48","slug":"my-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/work-in-japan\/find-a-job\/my-story\/","title":{"rendered":"My story"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When I arrived in Japan, I was what some call a &#8220;mid-career&#8221; professional, with an honours science degree and 11 years of experience in various aspects of software development. With this background, it would not be hard to find a job in the US, UK or Australia. But here, I faced the two common obstacles for foreigners in Japan: I hardly spoke Japanese; and I had no working visa.<\/p>\n<p>I knew it would take a while before I could <a href=\"\/japan\/topic\/learn-japanese\/\">improve my Japanese<\/a> to the point where it would help in my job hunt, so I decided to look for a job that required only English. After lots of research and emailing before I left, and a bit of legwork during the first week, I managed to get a verbal offer from a company after less than a month. Unfortunately, I was away travelling by this time, and by the time I returned a month or so later they rescinded the offer due to various company politics and so on. It took about two more months before I found another good company.<\/p>\n<p>When I first arrived, I thought it might take 3 months to get a job; if I still had nothing after 6 months I would have to reconsider. In the end, it took about 3 months, as expected.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve distilled my experiences down to a few topics. Lots of this stuff took me quite a while to sort out, much of it from various websites, so it should save you some time at least. In particular, it wasn&#8217;t easy to get complete and reliable information about working visa requirements and procedures, especially considering how crucial it is to get it right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I arrived in Japan, I was what some call a &#8220;mid-career&#8221; professional, with an honours science degree and 11 years of experience in various aspects of software development. With this background, it would not be hard to find a job in the US, UK or Australia. But here, I faced the two common obstacles [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}