The opportunities for foreign workers in Japan continue to improve and certainly for bilinguals in the IT, HR, travel, and financial sectors, there are plenty of jobs to go around. However, with the expansion of foreign involvement in the realm of professional services, the question of licenses and appropriate education become important. For example, very few foreigners...

Completing this group of articles, I'd like to offer some advice to foreign CEOs in Japan, who suspect that the terms of their employment are about to come to an end and who don't want to leave Japan. By "suspect", I mean that the head office is starting to make noises about personnel costs and how the Japan office needs to become more...

Last week, I wrote about the hazards of a foreign executive with a Japanese national as a spouse, deciding that he/she would like to live in Japan and somehow hoping to independently (i.e., not being hired as an expat and sent by the head office) jump into a similarly high-powered job here in Japan. While I'm sure there are exceptions, I've seen more than a few deflated...

Wrapping up on this series on Graphic Designers, I thought I'd make some comments about job titles and salaries. Perhaps not surprisingly, salaries in the design world in Japan are quite low because of the large number of people who want to be in the industry. Apart from the obvious need to be competent in design, there seems to be very little interest in...