I know this is the Jaapn times and it's focusing on its namesake. But I found it more interesting that the US fell from 1st to 4th in a single year on this digital competitiveness. Hope that isn't a slippery slope.
For Japan, the English skills aren't worth acknowledging. The digital competitiveness is unfortunate, but when you read the reasons (most of the current crises of the world that Japan got to experience first)
>The country still struggles with a number of significant challenges that hamper its efforts to become a technological leader, especially in terms of the ability of companies to adapt and the lack of the workers with the right skills and experience, the survey found.
Some of that lack of agility is cultural, but I suppose this simply all opens up the immigration question that's been pricking at them for some time now.
I don't think the US going 1st->4th is at all meaningful. According to the report the US went from 2nd to 18th in "adaptive attitudes" and 2nd->8th in general "future readiness." This seems more like a difference in how IMD is measuring things than a change in US economy/policy. But maybe the EU did something that moved their rankings upwards?
In general there is too
much complexity behind the ranking to tell a meaningful story about such a small decline in said rankings, especially when none of the variables are particularly quantitative in the first place! It's better to interpret this more as "the US is consistently in the top 5" than "the US is slipping," or "those wily Singaporeans finally beat the Americans."
I sure hope so. I did say slippery slope for a reason, I know it's a bad method of thinking overall
But seeing this data after I read other local reports of the US digital literacy plummeting with GenZ does give me a bad omen in my mind. But once is coincidence.
> I suppose this simply all opens up the immigration question that's been pricking at them for some time now.
No, it's really not, at least not for "digital competitiveness". It's extremely easy to immigrate to Japan for any kind of software or IT job; the government really couldn't make it any easier if they tried.
(Yes, you could make the case that Japan should increase immigration for rural farm work jobs, but that's not the kind of immigration we're talking about here.
Bringing in masses of uneducated people with no skills isn't going to help with "digital competitiveness".)
There are several problems affecting digital competitiveness in Japan. A big one is the language itself. English is the most-spoken 2nd language in the world, by a huge margin, and is de-facto the language of tech. Basically, you can't be a competent tech worker and not know English. College-educated people all over the world learn English, especially if they want to work at a global scale (e.g., in the tech industry, but many others too). So Anglophone countries have a huge natural advantage here, because a college-educated tech worker from $country can move to the US or UK or Australia or Canada and start working right away, and start living there without any huge language issues. The same isn't true for places like Japan and Germany, or really any non-English-speaking country. Some places accommodate English extremely well, with Netherlands being the poster child here, and as a result, Netherlands has lots of tech-related immigrants working there. Japan has it even worse because, unlike Germany, the other college-educated people here have poor English skills (every college-educated German I've ever met spoke amazing English), a result of various cultural factors. And unlike most European languages. Japanese is completely alien and not at all related to English, except in its frequent use of loanwords (which are then hard to recognize because of the very different writing system and phonology that it tries to fit them into).
Other problems for tech workers here just come from company culture: traditional companies expect to hire people fresh out of college and train them; they're not very good at hiring experienced people and integrating them into the corporate culture. They typically don't pay well either, so they're not globally competitive.
There are a fair number of smaller companies, typically start-ups, that focus on hiring foreign professionals and have an English-speaking environment, and they do benefit from Japan's very, very easy immigration system for skilled professionals, but you can only employ so many people in a bunch of small companies that aren't even profitable yet, and may never be (i.e., the definition of a start-up).
The government and society do try to accommodate English speakers as best as they can, but it's still challenging because most people, while they learned some English in secondary school, are simply not conversational, and try to avoid using it due to discomfort and fear of failure. But it's getting better, slowly. I didn't have any trouble doing necessary tasks at the local government office when I've had to; they were able to find bilingual workers to help me.
Honestly, I think that, with the two major English-speaking countries shooting themselves in the foot lately, Japan is in a good place to build its tech industry more, perhaps from western companies opening branch offices here. Unlike America which seems to hate immigrants these days (including highly-skilled professionals; the H1B isn't exactly easy or cheap to get, nor is permanent residency), Japan basically rolls the red carpet out for you if you're a college-educated and experienced tech professional, at least as far as visa issues go.
For Japan, the English skills aren't worth acknowledging. The digital competitiveness is unfortunate, but when you read the reasons (most of the current crises of the world that Japan got to experience first)
>The country still struggles with a number of significant challenges that hamper its efforts to become a technological leader, especially in terms of the ability of companies to adapt and the lack of the workers with the right skills and experience, the survey found.
Some of that lack of agility is cultural, but I suppose this simply all opens up the immigration question that's been pricking at them for some time now.