High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers - New York Times

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Andrew C Burnette [acb () acb net]
Sent: Monday, May 19, 2008 11:19 AM
To: David Farber
Subject: High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers - New York Times

Dave,

Looks like the hi tech allure is a problem outside the US as well.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/17/business/worldbusiness/17engineers.html?_r=1&oref=slogin


TOKYO — Japan is running out of engineers.

After years of fretting over coming shortages, the country is actually
facing a dwindling number of young people entering engineering and
technology-related fields.

Universities call it “rikei banare,” or “flight from science.” The
decline is growing so drastic that industry has begun advertising
campaigns intended to make engineering look sexy and cool, and companies
are slowly starting to import foreign workers, or sending jobs to where
the engineers are, in Vietnam and India.

It was engineering prowess that lifted this nation from postwar defeat
to economic superpower. But according to educators, executives and young
Japanese themselves, the young here are behaving more like Americans:
choosing better-paying fields like finance and medicine, or more purely
creative careers, like the arts, rather than following their salaryman
fathers into the unglamorous world of manufacturing.

The problem did not catch Japan by surprise. The first signs of
declining interest among the young in science and engineering appeared
almost two decades ago, after Japan reached first-world living
standards, and in recent years there has been a steady decline in the
number of science and engineering students. But only now are Japanese
companies starting to feel the real pinch.

By one ministry of internal affairs estimate, the digital technology
industry here is already short almost half a million engineers.

Headhunters have begun poaching engineers midcareer with fat signing
bonuses, a predatory practice once unheard-of in Japan’s less-cutthroat
version of capitalism.

The problem is likely to worsen because Japan has one of the lowest
birthrates in the world. “Japan is sitting on a demographic time bomb,”
said Kazuhiro Asakawa, a professor of business at Keio University. “An
explosion is going to take place. They see it coming, but no one is
doing enough about it.”

The shortage is causing rising anxiety about Japan’s competitiveness.
China turns out some 400,000 engineers every year, hoping to usurp
Japan’s place one day as Asia’s greatest economic power.

Afraid of a hollowing-out of its vaunted technology industries, Japan
has been scrambling to entice more of its younger citizens back into the
sciences and engineering. But labor experts say the belated measures are
limited and unlikely to fix the problem.

In the meantime, the country has slowly begun to accept more foreign
engineers, but nowhere near the number that industry needs.

While ingrained xenophobia is partly to blame, companies say Japan’s
language and closed corporate culture also create barriers so high that
many foreign engineers simply refuse to come, even when they are recruited.

As a result, some companies are moving research jobs to India and
Vietnam because they say it is easier than bringing non-Japanese
employees here.

Japan’s biggest problem may be the attitudes of affluence. Some young
Japanese, products of a rich society, unfamiliar with the postwar
hardships many of their parents and grandparents knew, do not see the
value in slaving over plans and numbers when they could make money, have
more contact with other people or have more fun.

Since 1999, the number of undergraduates majoring in sciences and
engineering has fallen 10 percent to 503,026, according to the education
ministry. (Just 1.1 percent of those students were foreign students.)
The number of students majoring in creative arts and health-related
fields rose during that time, the ministry said.

Applications to the engineering program at Utsunomiya University, an
hour north of Tokyo, have fallen one-third since 1999. Starting last
year, the school has tried to attract students by adding practical
instruction to its theory-laden curriculum. One addition was a class in
making camera lenses, offered in partnership with Canon, which drew 70
students, twice the expected turnout, said Toyohiko Yatagai, head of the
university’s center for optics research.

But engineering students see themselves as a vanishing breed. Masafumi
Hikita, a 24-year-old electric engineering senior, said most of his
former high school classmates chose college majors in economics to
pursue “easier money” in finance and banking. In fact, friends and
neighbors were surprised he picked a difficult field like engineering,
he said, with a reputation for long hours.

Mr. Hikita and other engineering students say their dwindling numbers
offer one benefit: they are a hot commodity among corporate recruiters.
A labor ministry survey last year showed there were 4.5 job openings for
every graduate specializing in fields like electronic machinery.

“We don’t need to find jobs,” said Kenta Yaegashi, 24, another
electrical engineering senior. “They find us.” He said his father, also
an engineer, was envious of the current sellers’ market, much less
crowded than the packed field he faced 30 years ago. Even top
manufacturers, who once had their pick of elite universities, say they
now have to court talent. This means companies must adapt their
recruiting pitches to appeal to changing social attitudes.

So, Nissan tells students they can advance their careers more quickly
there than at more traditional Japanese companies. The carmaker
emphasizes that it offers faster promotions, bigger pay raises and even
“career coaches” to help young talent ascend the corporate ladder.

“Students today are more demanding and individualistic, like
Westerners,” said Hitoshi Kawaguchi, senior vice president in charge of
human resources at Nissan.

On the more offbeat side, an ad for the steel industry features a
long-haired guitarist in spandex pants shouting, “Metal rocks!”

One source Japan has not yet fully tapped is foreign workers — unlike
Silicon Valley, filled with specialists in information technology, or
IT, from developing nations like India and China.

According to government statistics, Japan had 157,719 foreigners working
in highly skilled professions in 2006, twice as many as a decade ago,
but still a far cry from the 7.8 million in the United States. Britain
has also been aggressively recruiting foreign engineers, as have
Singapore and South Korea, labor experts say.

“Japan is losing out in the global market for top IT engineers,” said
Anthony D’Costa, a professor at Copenhagen Business School, who has
studied the migration of Indian engineers.

Companies are scrambling to change tactics now.

For instance, Kizou Tagomori, director of recruitment at Fujitsu, said
the computer maker and its affiliates routinely fell about 10 percent
shy of their annual hiring goal of 2,000 new employees. Fearing chronic
shortages, the company has begun hiring foreigners to work in Japan.

Starting in 2003, Fujitsu began hiring about 30 foreigners a year,
mostly other Asians who had graduated from Japanese universities.
Initially, many managers were reluctant to accept them. Mr. Tagomori
said they are now gaining acceptance.

Fujitsu’s 10 Indian employees in Japan won over some of their co-workers
by organizing a cricket team, he said.

But Fujitsu remains an exception. In an economic ministry survey last
year, 79 percent of Japanese companies say they either have no plans to
hire foreign engineers or are undecided. The ministry said most managers
still feared that foreigners would not be able to adapt to Japan’s
language or corporate culture.

To combat these attitudes, the ministry began the Asian Talent Fund, a
$30 million-a-year effort to offer Asian students Japanese language
training and internships in order to help them find work here.

“If these students do well, they can change Japanese attitudes
drastically,” said Go Takizawa, deputy director of the ministry’s human
resource policy division.

Nonetheless, labor experts warn Japan may be doing too little, too late.
They say the country has already gained a negative reputation as
discriminating against foreign employees, with weak job guarantees and
glass ceilings. Experts say Indian and other engineers will often opt
for more open markets like the United States.

Indeed, a growing number of Japanese companies are having more success
by building new research and development centers in countries with
surpluses of engineers. Toyo Engineering, which designs chemical
factories, said it and its affiliates now employ more engineers abroad —
3,000, mostly in India, Thailand and Malaysia — than in Japan, where
they have 2,500 workers.

With corporate Japan still reluctant to accept foreigners, a half-dozen
staffing companies have stepped into the breach by hiring Chinese and
South Korean engineers to send to Japanese companies on a temporary
basis. One of the biggest is Altech, which has set up training centers
at two Chinese universities to recruit engineering students and train
them in Japanese language and business customs. Of Altech’s roughly
2,400 engineers, 138 are Chinese, and the company plans to hire more at
a rate of 200 per year.

One of the first it hired was He Xifen, a 27-year-old mechanical
engineer from Qingdao University of Science and Technology who joined
Altech two and a half years ago. She said her friends back home envy her
because she works with advanced Japanese technology, and earns three or
four times more than she would in China.

While Japanese clients appear uncertain at first about how to deal with
foreigners, she said, they quickly catch on and she usually feels welcome.

“Foreign engineers are becoming accepted,” said Shigetaka Wako, a
spokesman for Altech. “Japan is slowly realizing that its economy cannot
continue without them.”

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