Japan Learns Least Outside Work: 52.6% Do Nothing at All

Japanese workers study less outside work than anyone else in Persol Research and Consulting's 18-country survey. Asked in 2022 whether they did any learning or self-development outside their employer, 52.6% of Japanese respondents said they did nothing in particular. That was the highest share of the 18 countries and regions. The average was 18.0%. Half a country doing nothing, against one in five elsewhere, is too big a gap to blame on individuals. If you run a team in Japan, it changes what training is for.

What the 52.6% measures

An online survey of employed people aged 20 to 69 who had lived in their country for at least three years, about 1,000 per country or region, fielded from 10 February to 14 March 2022. Persol Research and Consulting is the think tank of Persol, a Japanese staffing group. The survey is called the Global Employment and Growth Mindset Survey (グローバル就業実態・成長意識調査) and was published on 8 November 2022.

The denominator has two edges. The first is geography: Japanese respondents came from Tokyo, Osaka and Aichi, and the other samples also came from big cities, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou for China, New York, Washington and Los Angeles for the United States. It compares city workers with city workers. The second is the question itself: "learning or self-development outside your workplace", with options such as reading, training courses and seminars, certifications and languages. "Nothing in particular" is self-reported. People in different countries tick boxes differently, and Japanese respondents tend toward modest answers. I keep that in mind. It does not make 52.6% go away.

There is an earlier version. In 2019 the same institute surveyed 14 Asia-Pacific countries and regions. Japan's "nothing in particular" was 46.3%, again the highest, 24.2 points above second-placed New Zealand, while the Southeast Asian countries other than Singapore, India and China were all under 10%. Different country sets, so it is not a clean time series. The direction is the same, though: Japan last, by a wide margin.

How far behind is Japan?

About double the next country. In 2022, after Japan's 52.6% came Australia at 28.6%, Sweden 28.1%, the United Kingdom 24.1% and France 22.6%. Twenty-four points between first and second, and Japan at nearly three times the 18-country average of 18.0%.

Japan sits at the bottom of the same survey's other measures too. 40.0% said they already invest money in their own development, the lowest, and 42.0% said they have no plan to. 19.8% want to become a manager at their current employer, the lowest (India 90.5%, Vietnam 87.8%). 56.0% want to keep working at their current employer, the lowest. Only about two in ten want to change jobs, against an average of 35.2%. 49.1% feel happy through work, the lowest.

Put those together and a picture forms. Not learning, not aiming for promotion, not planning to leave, and not especially keen to stay.

The labor ministry's own numbers point the same way

Switch to official statistics and the figures land in a similar place. The Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare's Basic Survey of Human Resources Development (能力開発基本調査) for fiscal 2025, published 31 July 2026, sent individual questionnaires to 20,127 workers (43.9% responded). 35.5% had done any self-development in the past year: 43.3% of regular employees and 15.9% of non-regular employees. The ministry's "self-development" means voluntary activity to improve one's occupational skills, so the definition is not identical to Persol's, but even among permanent staff only a bit over four in ten are learning.

On the company side, 70.9% of establishments ran off-the-job training for regular employees and 60.6% ran planned on-the-job training for them. 54.4% of companies spent anything on training. Among those that did, off-the-job training cost 20,000 yen per worker per year and support for self-development 4,000 yen.

Twenty thousand yen a year is under 2,000 a month.

80.1% of establishments say they have a problem with developing people. The problems: not enough people to do the teaching, 59.5%; people leave after being trained, 51.6%; no time, 45.5%. Companies know they have to train, and know staff won't do it on their own. They are short of people, money and time. That is the current state.

Why it looks like this

My reading is that this is about what learning pays, not about laziness.

Japanese companies developed people in-house for decades. You joined from university, rotated through departments, learned on the job, and the company decided what you learned. What you learned came back through seniority and grade. Learning was the company's job. A certificate earned on your own time was not recognized and did not move your pay. The survey's other numbers are part of the result: two in ten want to be managers, about two in ten want to change jobs. If learning won't be used for promotion and won't be used to move, what exactly would you study for in the evening?

So "self-driven learner" as a hiring filter in Japan screens out most of the population. The few who pass are often people with a plan that lies outside your company.

What a foreign company should do with this

In Japan, training is an operating cost, like rent. Staff will not learn outside work, so the company has to build learning into the work itself. This line cannot be cut.

The mechanics are not complicated. Put learning inside working hours; don't count on evenings. Attach what is learned to a deliverable due within two weeks. Name who teaches, and count teaching as work, because the shortage Japanese companies complain about most is people to teach. Feed the result into evaluation and grade. As I wrote in Motivation is a design decision, people don't keep pushing on something that isn't scored.

On budget: 20,000 yen per head is the average among Japanese companies that spend anything on training at all. If you want an engineering team in Japan that keeps pace with headquarters, that figure will not do. How much more depends on the stack you need and whether the market has those people, so I won't give one number.

There is an upside. If few people learn outside work, the ones who do stand out in the market, and there are not many of them. I wrote about which layer of a person loses value first after AI; people who keep updating their equipment layer on their own will be worth more, not less. When you hire one, give them something others don't get. Otherwise they are the first to leave.

A last word on the edges of the number. 52.6% is self-reported, and "learning" is whatever the respondent thinks it is. Someone who reads technical documentation every day may still tick "nothing in particular". The survey also cannot see learning inside companies, and Japanese firms do a lot of on-the-job training that this questionnaire counts as zero. The precise statement is that Japanese workers don't learn outside the workplace. How much they learn inside it, this survey cannot say. For a foreign company the conclusion is the same either way. Learning is something you design.