In mid-May, NHK's nightly news feature "Closeup Gendai" looked at the current post-university recruitment situation from the viewpoint of the recruit. For the past decade, the main story with regard to this issue has been the difficulty of finding work as more and more companies restructured along nontraditional lines. But the program revealed a different aspect of the job-search dilemma.
College students, it turns out, have little idea of what they want to do. This was never a problem in the past, when companies hired graduates regardless of their field of study and then just trained them for various positions. Companies now demand that potential employees express "firm purpose" during interviews. Students who come across as being uncertain about what they want to do aren't asked back for followup interviews.
According to the program, a lot of students just give up looking for jobs because they have no idea what they want to do. The corporate world's demand for personal initiative gives rise to paralyzing indecision among them. On a questionnaire given out during a job-search seminar one student left blank most of the amorphous questions ("What is your dream?" etc. ), but in the space reserved for comments wrote, "Why do we have to work?"