Japanese language schools offering vocational training courses do not have sufficient capacity to accommodate all students

From April 2027, the ‘Skills Development and Employment Scheme’ will come into force, replacing the ‘Technical Trainee Programme’.

Under the ‘Training and Employment Programme’, applicants must possess Japanese language proficiency equivalent to Level N5 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) upon commencing work. If this requirement is not met, the applicant must undertake 100 hours of training. Furthermore, the applicant must improve their Japanese language proficiency to Level N4 within three years, and the employer must provide approximately 100 hours of training for this purpose.

However, there are currently concerns about a shortage of Japanese language teachers; if this situation continues, it will be difficult to put into practice the principle of ‘learning whilst working’, which aims to enable people to improve their Japanese language skills whilst in employment.

　I believe that the ‘Education-to-Employment Programme’ is a necessary measure for tackling labour shortages; however, in order to improve the programme, we must simultaneously strengthen a range of other measures, including Japanese language education, and we are therefore facing an extremely daunting challenge.

This article has been machine-translated from the original Japanese; please refer to the original Japanese text for the accurate content.

This article was machine-translated from Japanese. Please refer to the Japanese version for accurateinformation.