IT engineering is a field in which there are a lot of opportunities for non-Japanese who possess sufficient skills to work in Japan. There are 28,000 non-Japanese IT engineers working in Japan currently, comprising about 3 percent of all IT engineers in Japan, according to the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. The ministry projects that Japan will face a deficit of 789,000 software engineers by 2030, a gap that non-Japanese engineers are well-positioned to help fill.
The reason behind the need for engineers is in part the same as in other fields: the aging population here means there are fewer working-age people. Also, Japanese universities can't produce enough software engineers to keep up with the demand, especially in fields such as databases and AI development. Couple this with rising demand for skilled software developers, due to increase of software-based technologies such as AI, web-based services and the internet of things.
Many Japanese firms are so much in need of non-Japanese talent that they have relaxed their normal Japanese-language requirements. One prominent example is Rakuten, which began to hire non-Japanese engineers in large numbers since making English its official language. In addition, many Japanese startups have decided to make their workplaces multicultural from the get-go, both in order to leverage non-Japanese talent and to prepare themselves for future global expansion.
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