For the second straight year, Japan’s employment rate for new college graduates is up .3 points from a year earlier and now stands at 93.9% as of April 1. A labor ministry official said that the job situation for college graduates has been gradually improving since the collapse of the US investment bank Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.
The official said that most local and multinational companies have resumed hiring new employees, after almost five years of offering very few employment opportunities. The efforts of colleges and Hello Work job-placement offices to place graduating students in good jobs has also yielded positive results. The numbers do not include those graduates that are pursuing further studies in graduate school or those who stayed for another year in college because they still could not find a job. If you include those factors, the rate comes closer to 66% for overall graduates. Female graduates had a better rate of 94.7%, up 2.1 points than the male graduates who were at 93.2%, down 1.3 points.
The survey also showed that 93.4% of graduates of humanities courses and 96.2% of science courses found jobs within the same period. 94.7% of two-year junior college graduates were able to find employment, up 5.2 points and its highest since the survey began in 1997. High school graduates meanwhile also didn’t have such a hard time finding work for the third straight year: 95.8% of them have found gainful employment.
However, the numbers are still 3 points below than the 2008 statistics when it reached its peak.
24,000 graduates still remain jobless and so the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry and the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry are coming up with plans and programs to help in the job hunting process for new graduates, for a three-month period through June.
Source: Japandailypress.com
