Career Development and Employment Branding: a study on Japanese studies students’ job expectations in Europe

Among the challenging issues of worldwide enterprises, one of the most important for human resources management is employment branding. Every company has developed such strategy following all the values and ideas it transmits through its advertisement campaign and the quality of its core products. However, part of this concept is also represented by employees’ retention, a real challenge to reduce employees' turnover. Career development for the so-called Generation Y in Europe has been varying through the years, with increasing uncertainty. The purpose of my research is to investigate the different types of careers development Japanese studies students, who studied in European universities and who are interested in working in Japan as well as Europe, would like to pursue and what are the principal values they search in a company. I will survey what students’ expectations are and what the leading causes of employees’ voluntarily leave from a company would be. The survey will be targeting students (20-25 years old) searching for a job related to Japanese studies, to understand their future ambitions and the elements that retain them from working in that company for a long time. As my thesis will be written during my internship at Uniqlo, I will investigate the engagement of new graduates within the Uniqlo Manager Candidate Programme to have an example of a Graduate Programme carried out by a Japanese company that focuses on employee retention strategy.