The System That Trained People — and What's Vanishing Now
Japanese companies once had a mechanism for training many people together — half-forcibly bringing them up to a certain level. New hires went through the same training, helped their seniors, and picked up the shape of the work by repeating menial and routine tasks. Even without a clear sense of career direction, they were given assignments, failed, and had their work corrected by their bosses. Through that process, ordinary people gradually became practitioners.
Of course, the old way of raising people should not be romanticized. There were long hours, unreasonable hierarchies, personal denigration, and rigid one-size-fits-all training that ignored individual differences. Even so, there really was a function by which companies bore the cost of development, did not leave everything to a person's initial ability or self-motivation, and made sure the necessary experience was accumulated.
What is being lost now is more than the training programs themselves. It is the soil itself — the environment where many people learn together, get corrected by those around them, and grow regardless of whether they explicitly intended to.
In remote work, you can check the finished deliverables, but it is hard to see where a junior got stuck or what they misunderstood. Managers, fearful of harassment complaints, hold back even the corrections that would actually help. Generative AI makes research and document preparation more efficient — while eating away at the entry-level work through which juniors used to acquire the basics.
People who can frame their own questions, find the right people to ask, and check what AI produces can still grow in this environment. But those with little experience don't even know what they don't know. "Learn autonomously" sounds fair on the surface, but in practice it tends to widen the pre-existing gaps in education, experience, network, and self-efficacy.
In the Labor Shortage, No One Ends Up Training Anyone
On top of this, companies face a severe labor shortage. If they need people, one might think they could just hire the inexperienced and train them. But in reality, the opposite force is at work. If a newly hired employee leaves within a short period, recruiting costs, training costs, supervision hours, and handover burden all become losses. Because it is not easy to bring in the next person, the impact of a single failed hire on the company is also large.
It is not accurate to lump young people together and label them as "lacking perseverance." But we cannot ignore that more people no longer take long-term attachment to a company for granted, and that if the work, the sense of growth, or the human relationships don't match expectations, more of them change environments early. And some enter the workforce without having experienced serious correction.
In this environment, it is rational for individual companies to concentrate hiring on people who already have a track record, can operate independently, and are unlikely to leave early. It is also easier for a manager to hit short-term results by piling work onto the people who can already do it, rather than by spending time raising others.
People without experience cannot build a track record if they are not hired. Companies do not want to bear the risk of raising people without a track record. The inexperienced lose their entry point for gaining ability through work, and companies increasingly feel that "there is no one to hire."
But if every company acts the same way, no one is training the ready-to-work talent of tomorrow. Rational at the level of the individual company — a coordination failure at the level of society, one that shrinks human capital.
The Shrinking Middle, and the Limits of the Market
What lies beyond that is, most likely, a polarization between the strong and the weak — between an elite and everyone else.
On one side are people with high-quality education, real work experience, networks, and the ability to use AI — people who operate across companies and across borders. On the other are people who continue doing low-value-added work without being properly trained, and who don't even know what they would have to acquire in order to change their situation. The "thick middle layer" of practitioners that used to sit in between — the ones who understand the front line, coordinate with those around them, and raise the next generation — is shrinking.
The competitive labor market of the U.S. type has a real power to discover capable people and move them to more productive companies. But what the market is good at is selecting and reallocating people who are already grown — not training up people who are not yet strong from the ground.
Japan is weakening its old in-house training system without adequately building the vocational training, skill certification, re-education, and second-chance mechanisms that would replace it. It is trying to leave the closedness of employment and organizational structures intact — while making training alone an individual responsibility.
Strict on the Work, Not the Person — Who Trains Those Not Yet Anyone?
What is needed is neither a return to the old Japanese employment model nor forcing everyone to the same outcome.
At the entry point, provide the necessary experience, repetition, guidance, and feedback broadly, for a certain period. On top of that, evaluate the standards and results of the work strictly. Be strict on the work, not on the person. Anyone who cannot meet the standard is enabled to move to a different role or profession. Development that a single company cannot bear alone is supported by the industry and by society as a whole.
What Japan should be defending is not lifetime employment. It is the possibility that ordinary people, embedded in relationships with others and under a certain amount of compulsion, can still grow into capable ones.
If companies let go of that role, who will train those who haven't yet become anyone?
If we dismantle only the old Japanese way of raising people without holding the answer to that question, what remains is not a free and vibrant labor market. It is a rigid winner-take-all society where only those who were already grown from the start get the next opportunity. Is that really the shape we want for Japan as a country, as a culture, and for its people? I cannot help but wonder.
← Back to Thoughts