If you want to find a developer job in Japan without a university degree, or switch career tracks while in this country, there are several different paths to success. An increasing number of international students—76,402 of them in 2024—are deciding to enroll in vocational schools (専門学校, senmon gakkou) to secure employment in Japan.

These vocational schools are alternative post-secondary educational institutions that offer two-, three-, and four-year certification programs, depending on the industry and curriculum. While usually more expensive per year than universities, they cost less overall due to the accelerated nature of the programs.

I interviewed two recent vocational school graduates who have already successfully found employment as developers in Japan. This article will cover:

• What vocational schools offer
• Who chooses to attend vocational schools
• How to select a good school
• The entrance requirements
• Average costs
• The experience of attending a vocational school
• What the job hunt afterwards looks like
• Their top advice for those considering attending a vocational school

The vocational school system

Japan offers several post-secondary educational options. Aside from universities and junior colleges, there are vocational schools, or senmon gakkou. Senmon gakkou is also consistently translated as “professional training college,” and should not be confused with colleges of technology (国立高等専門学校, koutou senmon gakkou). Colleges of technology, also referred to with the abbreviation KOSEN (高専), are five-year programs usually attended by junior high school graduates from the age of 15. Vocational schools, by contrast, are intended for secondary school graduates, or sometimes for those who already possess a university degree or other qualifications but wish to train in a new field.

At vocational schools in Japan, students who complete a two-year program (1700 hours or more) receive a diploma and are eligible to transfer to a university; those who complete a four-year program (3400 hours or more) receive an advanced diploma, and can enter graduate school.

These schools are divided into eight fields:

• Liberal arts and culture
• Education and social welfare
• Business and commerce
• Industry
• Agriculture
• Medical care
• Hygiene
• Fashion and home economics

These categories encompass such diverse occupations as nursery school teachers, beauticians, nutritionists, interior designers, home helpers, animators, physical therapists, game creators, and—of course—software developers.

Who typically attends vocational schools?

One of those students was Eakudompong Chanoknan, who graduated from a Japanese vocational school in 2025. When he came to Japan in 2021 to attend a language school in Hokkaido, Chanoknan had already earned a four-year degree in his native Thailand, in International Relations. However, that wasn’t enough to ensure his employment in Japan. “I wanted to stay long term,” Chanoknan explained, “but finding an engineering or IT job without the relevant experience or education is a little bit hard.”

He considered attending a Japanese university and earning a computer science degree, but as he told me, “I’d already graduated from college, so I didn’t want to go back to school.” He decided instead on a three-year course at a vocational school, to prepare himself for a career in Japan without spending more time than necessary in the classroom.

At his school, Chanoknan told me, he was one of only a few students from Thailand. While there were many other international students in his classes, they were more often Vietnamese or Indonesian.

Another interviewee, who wished to remain anonymous and will be referred to by the pseudonym May, pursued a similar path. “I’m a 28-year old female engineer, born and raised in Myanmar, who lived a few years in the US attending a community college,” she said. “I dropped out of college and moved back to my country due to family reasons, and consequently worked an office job for about two years.

“I decided I wanted to move abroad and Japan seemed like a good choice, since there were so many Japanese language schools in Myanmar, and I’ve always had an interest in Japan for your usual reasons like anime, food, etc. So I enrolled in a Japanese language school in Okayama, Japan.”

May soon realized, like Chanoknan, that finding long-term employment in Japan would require additional education. “I was working an office job and didn’t finish my degree, so my career prospects were pretty dim,” she explained. “I’d always wanted to work in IT since I enjoyed programming. [Combining] that with my interest in Japan, I researched ways to live and work in Japan.”

I was deciding whether to transfer my college transcripts to a university in Japan, or go to a two-year senmon gakkou. I chose the senmon gakkou, since it was a faster way to graduate and get a job.

Entrance requirements

That last qualification is somewhat flexible. Some schools will also accept students who can prove they’ve studied Japanese at a government-certified language school for a minimum of six months; others require a full year in language school. Additional options include having been enrolled in a Japanese public school for one year or more, scoring at least 200 points on the Examination for Japanese University Admission for International Students, or scoring at least 400 points on the Business Proficiency Japanese Test.

The good news is that, if you speak Japanese at a high level, schools may offer discounted tuition.

Visa considerations

Students attending a vocational school are eligible for a student visa in Japan. This visa also allows the student to work part-time, up to 28 hours per week.

Those who complete their course of study, and are subsequently hired by a company in Japan, can apply to change their status of residence from student to one of the various working visas. Initially Japan’s Immigration Services Agency (ISA) evaluated these applications quite strictly. In principle, to qualify for a work visa, your studies must be related to the work you wish to perform: for example, someone with a degree in Sociology who is hired as a Pharmaceutical Researcher might be rejected for a visa on that basis. This relationship between one’s major and one’s subsequent job historically was evaluated quite flexibly for those with university degrees, and much more strictly with those applicants who graduated from vocational school.

As of February 2024, however, the ISA relaxed its requirements for vocational school students, stating that the relationship between an applicant’s course of study and their job duties would be considered just as flexibly as it would be for university graduates.

Vocational school graduates can qualify for Japan’s Highly-Skilled Professional visa, if they have enough points. However, only those who have earned an Advanced Diploma from a vocational school can earn academic history points toward the visa. An ordinary two-year diploma doesn’t count toward points.

Choosing your vocational school

There are over 2700 vocational schools in Japan, organized by different institutions, catering to different industries, and aimed at different populations. “If you decide on the vocational college path,” Chanoknan advised, “you have to [make an effort] to choose your school.”

Look at the curriculum. You have to compare a lot of curricula, because vocational colleges are easier to [found] than a university, so there are a lot of companies that do vocational schools, but not all of them have the same quality.

Some of the red flags for low-quality schools, according to Chanoknan, include trendy or topical course names that don’t match the actual classroom content. If the course is titled something like “AI Development Research,” but the actual curriculum is teaching Python, that should be a warning sign. Low-quality schools also tend to fill their programs with anything tech-related, like CAD design and Excel. “If they have any other thing that’s not related to programming, or studying for qualifications . . . yeah, that’s usually a red flag,” Chanoknan confirmed.

When asked about green flags, Chanoknan strongly suggested going to the open campus event. “You can talk to the teacher or actually go look at the school, like ‘What does this look like?’ and ‘So what does this curriculum look like?’ They’re going to try to sell you a lot of stuff,” he added, “but if you’re in Japan it’s better to go actually visit.”

If you’re in Japan when applying to vocational schools, you’ll most likely need to attend an open campus event as part of the entrance process anyway. If you’re overseas, though, you’ll typically arrange registration through an agency. If that’s the case, Chanoknan suggests avoiding any independent agencies. Most larger, reputable schools will have their own in-house agency for international students, so cutting out the middleman helps save both money and confusion.

Most students will go on to seek employment in Japan, so it’s worth checking your school’s post-graduation employment statistics. “My concern was getting employed,” May said, “so I did a ton of research and found some senmon gakkou with a high rate of employment after graduating. This school also had a major that I was interested in and it was in Tokyo; it was just a match for most of the things I wanted.”

To start getting a sense of what Japanese vocational schools have to offer, check out this summary of ten of the most famous professional training colleges in Japan, many of which are IT-oriented.

More broadly, the Association for Technical and Career Education has a database of professional training colleges that accept international students. The list is organized by prefecture and desired course.

What are the costs?

Study in Japan lists the average tuition fee of vocational schools as 900,000 yen per year. This chart breaks down yearly costs by discipline: with other fees included, the average IT-related diploma runs between 1.2 and 1.4 million yen per year.

May paid 2.5 million yen total for her two-year program, which would be considered average. According to Chanoknan, his school’s full tuition was also around 1.3 million yen a year. “But,” he added, “if you get your language certification—like N2, N1—it can get a lot cheaper.”

Why offer such steep discounts for language qualifications? “If you speak the language, you have a higher chance of getting the job,” Chanoknan explained. “So it’s kind of a safety net for them. If you join the school, what they want is [for] everybody to get a job, so if you [see] their advertisement or their school homepage, they’re going to have their percentage, like ‘98 percent of our students got a job in Japan.’” To help ensure that percentage remains high, vocational schools like Chanoknan’s are willing to slash their tuition rates for qualified students.

For me, I have the N1 qualification, so I only paid about 700,000 yen a year.

What is the experience like?

Both interviewees attended classes that were a mix of international students and native Japanese. May didn’t particularly struggle with either the coursework or language. “I already knew basic programming beforehand and was doing personal projects in my free time, so programming classes were not a problem,” she explained. Some of her classmates experienced more difficulty.

There were some who just couldn’t keep up with the workload. Our classes were from about 9:30 to 4:30 p.m. It was like a full-time job in a way. They cram a lot of information into a two-year period, [so] there were some people who could not keep up and quit.

“Some people who spoke native Japanese struggled,” she added, “so international students who had N2 on paper but could not speak at that level were really struggling.”

Chanoknan’s school had a similar schedule. “Three to four periods a day, so four to six hours a day, [or] 20 hours a week. You have time for your part-time job, and stuff.” In many ways, he told me, the greatest challenge was balancing school and work.

If you don’t have the funds, the money to stay here long term, you’re going to have to do a part-time job. And that is a really, really hard experience, when you need to keep up with your studying as well.

The initial coursework kept Chanoknan busy, but he didn’t find it particularly intense. The first year covered the basics of programming in Java, databases, and web development, along with some android application development. “There are really a lot of basic things, but not really going into specifics,” explained Chanoknan.

The second and third years’ coursework was more interesting for him personally. “After the first year they’re really focusing on group projects, and also your personal projects.” Every semester involved a group project with a team of three to five people. “What you make is up to you, but they have a process that you have to [follow]. . . .They want you to experience what it takes to create a system from scratch.”

“I had a lot of fun,” he told me, “but sometimes you can decide on the [team] members yourself, and sometimes there’s a problem with that. But overall I had a good time.”

His school, like most vocational schools in Japan, spent time preparing students to earn national qualifications as well as a diploma. Chanoknan took the Fundamental Information Technology Engineer Examination (基本情報技術者試験, Kihon Jouhou Gijutsusha Shiken), which his school particularly emphasized for future developers.

While Chanoknan’s school leaned heavily on group collaborations, May’s schoolwork was more classroom based. Her day did include a free period during which students could work on their final graduation projects. “It was a programming course,” she said, “so we did finish a couple of small apps/projects during each term. There was some group work, but most of it was individual.”

My favorite part was just meeting new people and learning things that I enjoyed.

On the other hand, May added, “I had to live in the outskirts of Tokyo to save costs, and my least favorite [thing] was the one-hour commute to school on the Saikyo line. The train delays made me question if I really wanted to live in Tokyo.”

She didn’t test for any national qualifications except for JLPT and TOEIC, but that didn’t prevent her from successfully landing a job not long after graduation.

What are the career prospects afterwards?

Since one of the goals of these schools is to enable students to find employment as quickly as possible, most vocational schools heavily advertise their job placement success rates. Some, such as Nara Computer College and the Osaka College of Design and Technology, have for some years reported a 100 percent employment rate. HAL in Osaka has maintained a 100 percent employment rate for 18 years, although that number drops to 92 percent if they include students not seeking employment.

Typically, vocational school students experience a version of the normal new graduate hiring process in Japan. “We do everything kind of like university students,” Chanoknan confirmed. This means that, the year before they graduate, they begin to interview with companies and take employment tests.

“One of the benefits of going to senmon gakkou,” Chanoknan said, “is that you can use the new graduate hiring pipeline, where the qualification bar is generally lower compared to applying as a mid-career hire. However, some companies have age restrictions for new graduate applicants.”

This does limit the utility of vocational schools for older students, so he wouldn’t recommend attending if you’re over age 25. “You may end up competing as a mid-career hire despite having little to no work experience,” he explained. “When you come from overseas,” said Chanoknan, “usually you’re going to come to Japan after you finish college, or you have work experience for one or two years. . . . You can do the new graduate pipeline.”

“If you’re a little bit older,” Chanoknan continued, “some companies are going to have an age restriction for the new graduate pipeline. Usually it’s 30 years old. Sometimes I have seen it’s 28 [years old] as well.”

For those without much work experience, he wouldn’t recommend joining a vocational school after age 25. However, Chanoknan added, “I have seen some older people [succeed], but it’s a different case, because they have experience.” Those with significant prior work experience may still be able to use a vocational school to change careers while in Japan, just not via the usual channels.

Chanoknan himself was hired in an unusual way—by winning the PR Times Hackathon. “I joined that and I ended up winning, and they [PR Times] invited me for an interview, and I got the job from there.” They also sponsored him for an Engineer/Specialist in Humanities/International Services visa.

“My workplace is really, really good,” he told me. “There are a few international engineers, say four or five people that, like me, are from overseas, and yeah, it’s a lot of fun. I’m learning a lot.”

His friends from the school also had little trouble finding employment, though Chanoknan cautioned that “There are not a lot of problems finding a job, but the problem is not finding a good job.”

The school supports you all the way in the [job-hunting] process, but for the school, they want everybody to get a job so they can advertise and say, ‘Oh, all our students got a job.’ But you have to be careful what they give to you. You have to look [at it] really carefully.

May also found employment quite quickly, as a Smartphone Engineer, and now has a five-year Engineer/Specialist in Humanities/International Services visa. “The senmon gakkou I went to held career fairs every six months or so,” she said, “where around 50 companies would participate. These career fairs provided me with useful insights such as what kind of company I would like to work for, and the kind of technical skills you need for different jobs. Ultimately I got a job through one of the career fairs so it was a huge help.”

In my field (iOS development), education history does not have that much impact, but it is a hard field to get into. The route I took was graduating from a senmon gakkou and joining as a shinsotsu (新卒, new graduate). You do have to start from zero, but this kind of opportunity is pretty rare.

She noted that there is a difference when job-hunting with a vocational school diploma rather than a university degree. “Going to a senmon gakkou does limit the type of jobs I can qualify for. Some companies do ask for university-level education, and in traditional Japanese companies, the salaries differ based on your education level.”

Interestingly, HAL reports that graduates of their 4-year program have an average starting salary of 266,532 yen per month (around 3.2 million yen a year), and those of their 2-year program start at 263,963 yen (around 3.17 million yen a year). While that compares a 4-year diploma and a 2-year diploma from a vocational school, rather than to graduates with a university degree, it’s suggestive that the difference remains small.

Final advice

Chanoknan feels strongly that students at a vocational school must be motivated and self-directed to get the most out of their education.

Don’t expect them to teach you everything. . . . Some come in like they expect to be taught everything, but they’re going to tell you the basics. After that you have to study for yourself.

May expressed a similar sentiment. “My one [piece of] advice would be to plan everything out from the start,” she said.

Plan which school and department you want to go to, and decide what you want to achieve by the end. Having a clear goal will help you succeed.

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If you want more information about finding a developer job in Japan, including what visas work best, average salaries, and how to network in Japan, check out our extensive library of articles.