OPINION: Giving Govt Workers Sense of Growth Would Benefit Japan

By Nobutoshi Kobayashi Commentary Writer Tokyo, Sept. 8 (Jiji Press)–After years of decline, applications for Japan’s national civil service examination for career-track positions are showing signs of recovery, with the spring 2026 exam attracting more hopefuls than a year earlier, marking the first increase in four years. Nevertheless, one in five young career-track civil servants still leaves within their first 10 years of employment, even though the share has gone down. Seeking to address this problem, the National Personnel Authority included proposals in its pay recommendations this summer to assign senior officials to positions that reflect their capabilities and compensate them according to their responsibilities. If implemented, the proposals would mark a significant shift toward merit-based personnel management in a government system in which the year an employee entered a ministry or agency has traditionally had a strong influence on career advancement. Another NPA initiative that could affect how young bureaucrats view their work is its recently compiled list of skills for national civil servants. The list identifies 57 capabilities required of government employees–or, from another perspective, skills that people can acquire through public service. The initiative is intended to address a lack of perceived professional growth, one reason young civil servants cite for leaving government employment. Coordination Skills In Kasumigaseki, the central Tokyo district where many government ministries and agencies are concentrated, saying that someone “has excellent coordination skills” is among the highest forms of praise. Such skills can broadly be described as the ability to build consensus. Whether officials are creating a new system or revising or abolishing an existing one, they face the onerous task of reconciling competing interests and finding a solution acceptable to all parties. Yet what such skills actually entail has never been clearly defined. They have largely remained a form of tacit knowledge, learned through experience rather than formal instruction. The NPA’s list can therefore be interpreted as an attempt to make coordination skills more visible by breaking them down and describing them in concrete terms. Hisashi Harada, a professor of public administration at Rikkyo University, says many government employees do not feel that they are being developed adequately as professionals. “They spend their time wondering whether they are really acquiring useful skills and worrying about what their future holds,” he explains. According to Harada, their outlook differs markedly from that of their mid-level and senior colleagues, who learned primarily by observing more experienced officials at work. Harada says that talented employees–those with the greatest range of career options–“will be the first to leave if they cannot genuinely feel that they are growing.” The NPA expects ministries and agencies to use the list when they design training programs and conduct regular one-on-one meetings between employees and their supervisors. The list could help employees identify the skills they have developed, as well as the areas in which they need to improve. The NPA hopes that giving young civil servants a clearer sense of their own professional growth will ease their anxieties about the future and help reduce early resignations. New Meaning of Stability Shoko Ide, a senior researcher at the Mynavi Career Research Lab, says, “Today’s students are highly anxious about the future and increasingly seek stability in their careers.” This generation has lived through the COVID-19 pandemic and witnessed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It also faces growing uncertainty over the rapid spread of artificial intelligence, which could reduce employment opportunities in some private-sector industries. Seen in this context, young people’s desire for stability is not necessarily inconsistent with the fact that about 30 pct of private-sector employees change employers within three years of being hired. Rather, the meaning of stability has changed. In the past, stability generally meant remaining with the same employer for many years. Today, it increasingly indicates maintaining one’s employability by acquiring skills that are transferable across organizations and industries. From this perspective, changing jobs may be a way of pursuing career stability rather than a sign of instability. If the NPA’s list makes civil servants’ abilities more visible and easier to explain to prospective employers, it could give government employees greater confidence in seeking work elsewhere. In that sense, the initiative may initially encourage some young career-track officials to leave public service. That should not necessarily be taken as a problem, however. More private-sector employees can be expected to enter public service. There has also been an increase in the number of people who leave government for the private sector and later return to public service to help formulate policy. Making professional skills easier to recognize, and to describe, could bring forward the emergence of a “revolving-door society” in Japan–one in which highly capable and motivated people move freely between the public and private sectors, applying their expertise wherever it is most needed. Such mobility would not weaken the civil service. On the contrary, it could make the government and the broader Japanese workforce more adaptable to the changing needs of the times. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]