Greetings, I am at crossroads and would love some advise
I am a 26-year-old English Philology student. I will be finishing my career next semester as a exchange student in Japan, and I will be 27 when I finish in July next year.
As the title says, despite doing that degree, I realised I am far more passionate about coding, backend in particular. I do have knowledge about it since back when I was 18 I finished the equivalent to vocational training in my country where I was taught html, css, java, php and all that jazz. However, my work experience is only the unpaid internships I had when I was doing that vocational training and 4 more months of another (paid) internship in 2019, and as far as I know that internship does not count as real work experience for my career in Japan.
At first my plan was to:
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Job hunt as much as I can and land an IT job, in my home country or japan, doesnt matter, to gain some work experience for at least a few months. (I would finish my degree in July, and I would stop or change to part time in april, so at best it would only be half a year of work experience, still better than nothing).
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Do a master in IT in a japanese university that also has a HSP bonus, which would give me enough points to grant me the chance to get the high skilled professional visa.
In this case assuming everything goes well, I would end up as a 29 year old HSP with at best 6 months of work experience (from what I heard, a part time job does not count as work experience in japan). Having a HSP is very attractive to me since my parents while healthy for their age are in their late 60s and I would love the have the freedom that PR would give me to visit them after 3 years in japan instead of 10 (this is also why I find the chance of working remotely attractive, something that would be more complicated as an english teacher, besides me realizing I prefer coding over teaching). However I heard that even after being a fresh grad from a master it is extremely hard to find a job in IT with no work experience once you are 30, and I would be dangerously close to that age, assuming I dont fail any subjects or have to take another semester of obligatory subjects for going from english to IT, so I dont know if continuing my studies full time woud be too risky
The other option I considered is trying to find a full time IT job in Japan when I finish next year and if possible do the Master part time to still be able to be a HSP in 3-4 years (I do have the chance of getting the work holiday Visa to have a better time finding it).
Of course there is a third option (In the case its possible, which I have seen some people say it is) of doing both things full time, but I dont know if that would be a good idea. I'd be thankful if someone had that experience. Also in that case, I suppose I should go to Japan on a work visa and not a student visa?
Of these paths, which one would be the best one to take? And is it even possible to find a job in Japan as a foreigner fresh grad from an unrelated field? As a side note, I will have a lot of free time when I am as a exchange student the second semester since I wont have many subjects to finish (most of the subjects I have left are from the first semester) so I will have free time to focus on refreshing and improving my programming skills those four months, in case you do have some advise on things that I could do to improve my chances of landing an IT job, like preparing an attractive github.
by Professional_Fix8359