Classroom Disconnect

Apr 27

The true reason for Japan’s critical developer shortage

Society and the economy are changing at a rapid pace, and it is now clear that the path forward for Japan is a digital one. That’s true for the world as a whole, but Japan is redoubling its efforts to make up for lost time and become more globally competitive.

To this end, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has established the Digital Agency to address the need for government-wide digital transformation and widespread sharing of currently siloed information. Of course, seeing a need is always easier than meeting a need, and Japan has a lot of work to do before that vision can be realized.

Education First

Succeeding in businesses in the years to come will require tech-savvy staff. Building that foundation starts with education—and not just at the university level. Kids need to be learning to use tech to solve problems at an early age. The Japanese government announced in May 2019 that programming would be added as a mandatory part of the curriculum in elementary, middle, and high schools starting in 2020, 2021, and 2022, respectively.

This is an important start, and to fully address the shortage of programmers and highly skilled tech workers—projected by government studies to number 430,000 by 2025 and 600,000 by 2030—we will also need to find a way to ensure that students are actually learning applicable skills.

Kids need to be learning to use tech to solve problems at an early age.

On my podcast Disrupting Japan, I had a chance to explore this topic with Masa Kato, founder and chief executive officer of edtech startup Progate Inc., which teaches programming online.

Kato said that Progate’s target is people in their twenties and thirties who don’t currently work in the information technology (IT) sector but would like to shift to IT-related fields. But the platform, which was launched in 2014 and now has 2 million users in more than 100 countries, is becoming more popular with teenagers in Japan—a great thing for the prospects of digital transformation.

The Hands-on Problem

One interesting thing about Progate is that Kato started the company while still a student at the University of Tokyo—and what spurred him to do so reflects a problem that still faces the country’s educational system.

“When I first started learning programming, I was in my third year of university,” he recalled. “That’s when people started to choose their major at the University of Tokyo, so I chose computer science. That was my first experience with programming, and I wanted to learn how to make web services and iPhone apps. I thought programming was really cool, so I wanted to learn that, and I majored in computer science with high hopes. But what I actually learned there was not quite what I had expected. It was more academic.”

What Kato learned in this university programming course was largely the history of programming, not the hands-on skill of programming that is needed to actually make things and solve problems.

“That was interesting, and I’d love to learn it now that I’m an actual programmer, but back then I wanted to know more practical stuff,” he told me. “But the professors didn’t really teach me that, which is understandable because they weren’t really doing the latest web stuff.”

Course Correction

That disconnect between academia and application seems to be at the core of the problem that has led to Japan’s shockingly low ranking of 38th globally when it comes to developing digital talent.

“I think the problem with all these educational institutions in Japan is that a lot of the teachers have no experience in any practical programming, so the lack of teachers is a big issue,” Kato said.

This could be an obstacle for the government’s introduction of mandatory programming courses in primary and secondary schools as well, but through platforms such as Progate there is an opportunity to build a strong foundation of educators who can deliver a generation of digital natives with the skills to keep Japan near the top of the global economy.

If we can change the trajectory of education and teach real-world skills, as Kato is doing following his own experiences in school, then the Japan Digital Agenda 2030 has a strong chance of success.