Japan’s 2008 Univerity Graduates in a Good Position for Job Hunting: Recruit

April 25, 2007
By Ken Worsley

Works Institute is the research arm of Recruit. Why should you care?

Earlier today, Works Institute published a survey concerning corporate hiring for Spring 2008 (unfortunately, they only published a Japanese version. Their last English publication appears to have been in 2002). Works Institute sent surveys to 7,315 companies employing at least five people and heard responses from 4,360 of them. The surveys were carried out from February 8 to march 12 of this year.

Results? Works Institute estimates that new hiring due to improving economic conditions and the mass retirement of baby boomers will add up to 933,000 graduates of universities and graduate schools in the spring of 2008. In terms of raw numbers, this would be a 13.0% rise from 2007 and would exceed the peak reached during the bubble towards the end of the 1980s.

This would mean that next spring we will see 2.14 job offers per applicant, up from 1.89 this year and above the 2.0 threshold for the first time since 1992.

One strange thing about the 13% rise in new graduate hires projected for next year: According to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, in 2007, 87.7% of students graduating this spring from Japan’s universities who intended to find work had successfully done so by February 1st. There were 532,000 university graduates in 2007…

Where do the rest of the 933,000 students come from? Recruit’s data says university and graduate school graduates. If we add junior college, vocational school and military academy graduates to the 2007 university graduate numbers, we get a grand total of 916,000 students in 2007.

How big is this 2008 graduating class?

Filed Under Japan