Reflecting on Three Years of Professional Life

After graduating from a regional national university, I joined a foreign IT company, and I am now in my fourth year as a working professional. Three years have passed quickly since I started working, and I would like to briefly reflect on my career so far.

First Year

When I first joined the company, it was during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, so all training was completed remotely, which was quite different from what I had imagined for the start of my professional life. I was assigned to a different department than I had hoped for, and I remember the time I spent organizing PCs in a warehouse in Shibaura during my OJT. Later, I was assigned to a project managing devices for an automobile company, where I was given tasks unrelated to IT, such as organizing PC inventory in a warehouse in Kanagawa Prefecture. I remember feeling confused, wondering why I had joined an IT company. The project was not particularly demanding, so there was almost no overtime. My colleague S, who graduated from an American university, lost motivation shortly after his assignment, and as our conversations decreased, he eventually resigned. The first year passed by in a rather unproductive manner.

Second Year

Due to the extremely relaxed nature of my initial project, I consulted the department head for more work and was involved in a collaborative activity with one of the GAFA companies. I was initially motivated by the opportunity to meet people from other companies in person, but as the collaboration progressed, we struggled to secure projects, leading to days filled with mere meeting attendance without any sense of growth. A BI tool development project came from a different department of the same client I had been involved with since the first year, but the project was frozen midway, and maintaining motivation became increasingly difficult. Toward the end of the year, I was assigned to a project that was in crisis, but it involved tasks like taking screenshots, wasting my days, and the second year passed by without much progress.

Third Year

In my third year, I was transferred from a team focused on operations to one responsible for proposals, design, and construction. Continuing with the support tasks from the previous year, I then participated in a new proposal activity. The project was deemed important by the headquarters, and there was a lot of enthusiasm, with the sales representative from Asia visiting Japan. However, as a junior employee, my tasks were reduced to translating documents from various countries using DeepL, which was disheartening. Subsequent projects involved minor tasks like dealing with leftover accounts, with almost no overtime. Despite joining a system integrator, I ended my third year with little to no development experience.

This is a brief reflection on my career so far. Originally, I joined the company hoping to gain experience in implementing major foreign package products, but three years have passed with almost no experience in system implementation. As for the future, I am currently considering my options and have started job hunting, including exploring completely different industries.