Day 208 of writing every day.
When you see the name “IT Passport,” it makes the exam and certification seem like a tech/coding heavy ordeal, but the reality is that two thirds of it is about business strategy and management principles. For example, the tendency to use acronyms instead of plain English seems to be pretty common nowadays on LinkedIn, the go-to professional social network.
I find it kind of condescending to use acronyms instead of plain English as it implies that your lack of knowledge makes you unqualified, and it immediately imposes a communication barrier between you and whoever is posting. It’s like this rule where you have to speak “their language” to get your foot in the door to their industry, which might be true for people at midcareer level in the industry they’ve been working in. If anything, the ability to communicate should focus more on reaching a wider audience, rather than a select group of people.
However, I understand that to fill positions where experience is required that it’s easier to show up in search results by using keywords and whatnot to whittle down the types of search results your posts show up in as well, and to reduce the probability of people who aren’t even close to being qualified for specialized jobs applying for them.
To that end, I think the idea of using LinkedIn is pretty useless for a majority of people as it seems to be very biased towards certain industries and types of work. Reading through the study materials for the IT Passport exam, I find myself able to start recognizing some of the acronyms being thrown around. The thought that you have to go out of your way to understand the lingo being thrown around kinda makes me wonder how disconnected from reality these working professionals are on LinkedIn.
Anyways, if what I received for my education has left me so unprepared for the realities of finding work and being qualified to do the work, perhaps it’s time governments stop deciding everything on what students need to learn and start letting businesses play a role in teaching students skills that they themselves want in workers. After all, education is heavily biased towards a consumer economy that basically relegates food production to a small minority while the vast majority slave away in the city for some profiteering company.
What’s the point in focusing on subjects that only take place in textbooks instead of finding a way to connect them to the realities of the world? Schools seem to act like some alternate reality shielded from the rest of society where kids make their own social groups vs. teachers as opposed to belonging to a greater part of society where they have a clear idea what their education is going to help them with when society decides they are old enough to start paying their dues.
Understanding how companies operate and having concrete ideas about the roles people play within them has helped me better understand the challenges of building a successful business. Perhaps I might even be feeling more appreciative of the job I left because I better understand what my role was and what a company has to do to ensure it makes more money.
I have asked myself if I would be in a better position now should I have sucked it up and stayed in a job that was making me miserable. The thoughts regularly appear as I get confronted with rejections in my job hunt and the rejected application for permanent residency. I’m guessing that I probably would have gotten permanent residency midway through the renewed work contract and I could have submitted my resignation then and there and not have to worry about being able to stay in Japan anymore based on whether I had a job or not.
Feeling miserable for a couple more months might have been preferable to the reality I was confronted with in the need to find employment soon AND that I’d have to try again for permanent residency in the future because I couldn’t “man up and take it” in regards to my job.
On the other hand, there’s always internal politics in big companies and some people are more than willing to throw others under the bus or talk shit behind people’s backs just to try and get a promotion or gain recognition that makes them stand out more than their peers. But the vast majority seemed to have to ambition and pretty much accepted that testing games were the only thing they could do for a living, and there was zero push from supervisors to study up on something as fundamental as the IT Passport since it was not needed to do the job and they weren’t looking to move people up internally.
I’ve seen more people quit that company in my 1.5 years working there than I have in the past 8 years of working in Japan combined, so workers generally weren’t that happy, at least in regards to non-Japanese individuals. I doubt I would’ve pushed myself to study for the IT Passport exam like I’m doing now had I stayed.
I’m not going to be held back by these thoughts because things always seem clearer in retrospect, and just because you know doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily change the choices you made and will make. Things don’t go as planned for most of us and I just have to accept that reality and press on.
Thanks for reading!
One Chance Works 