Committing to lifetime employment at one Japanese company vs. changing jobs mid-career
If you act
Staying with one company for life
25%
If you don't
Changing jobs mid-career
60%
Percentage who later regret each choice. Bars and full ledger render below.
Career
Last reviewed 2026-05-13
Evidence quality 3.88/5
Eight-dimension review score against the
quality rubric
. Each dimension scored 1–5.
D1 Source verification
2/5
D2 Source authority & independence
3/5
D3 Regret-rate accuracy
2/5
D4 Source comparability
5/5
D5 Gilovich pattern
5/5
D6 Prose quality
4/5
D7 Caveat completeness
5/5
D8 Sample quality
5/5
Average3.88/5
Proxy data — no direct regret survey exists for this decision. Rates are derived from satisfaction scores and access-barrier data rather than questions that directly asked about regret. See caveats below.
Action regret
Staying with one company for life
25%
25% of Japanese workers who considered changing jobs but stayed regret not having changed
Japanese working adults (20-60) who considered a job change but did not change jobs
retrospective survey, October 2024
Inaction regret
Changing jobs mid-career
60%
59.7% of recent Japanese job-changers say they regretted or felt they failed after changing jobs
Japanese employees aged 22-59 who changed jobs within the past 3 years
retrospective survey, June 2022
% who regret this choice
Staying with one company for lifeChanging jobs mid-career
25%60%
inaction dominates — Inaction dominates — most regret not acting.
Related decisions
Semantically similar decisions — same territory, different trade-offs.
A Shikigaku survey of 1,000 Japanese employees who had changed jobs in the previous three
years found that 59.7% reported regret or a sense of failure after joining their new
employer — most often because the salary was lower than expected, or because the new
organisation’s culture did not fit. On the other side, a VALUE WORKS survey of 301 working
adults who had considered a job change but stayed found that only 25% regret not having
changed — the other 75% said they do not regret staying, although half of that group report
they are still reconsidering a move. Taken together, the surveys point to more regret from
changing jobs than from staying. The Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training (JILPT)
2022 analysis adds context but no direct regret rate: it finds mid-career job-changers report
higher work engagement and self-evaluated performance than long-time employees, and that holding
a professional qualification or licence correlates with better wages after a change — a plausible
driver of the minority who regret not having moved.
The pattern here is inaction-dominates — regret runs higher among those who took the action
(changed jobs) than among those who stayed, which is the modal configuration in Gilovich and
Medvec’s temporal regret model only in the short term; over long horizons their model expects
inaction regret to grow. The two figures are not strictly comparable: they come from different
surveys, different years, and different populations, and Japanese job-change-regret polls vary
widely (other surveys report closer to one-in-four job-changer regret, well below Shikigaku’s
59.7%). What is consistent is that a clear majority of stayers do not regret staying, while a
majority of recent changers express at least some regret — frequently driven by pay that fell
short of expectations rather than by a wholesale rejection of the move.
Both rates carry framing caveats: the surveys were run by recruiting-adjacent organisations,
and the stayer “no regret” figure sits uneasily beside the finding that half of those same
workers are still weighing a change. An earlier version of this entry attributed both rates to
a single En Japan survey; that survey, per Nippon.com coverage, actually measured how overtime
affects which company people pick when changing jobs and reported no regret data at all, so its
figures have been replaced with the two direct-regret surveys above. The framing also assumes
genuine access to lifetime employment, which is shrinking: Japan’s share of non-regular workers
rose from 15% in 1984 to roughly 37% in 2023, so for a growing fraction of the workforce the
choice this entry describes is no longer available.
Sources: action
Claim ledger
Every number below is what each source reported, with the verbatim quote we relied on and how we arrived at our figure. Click any link to verify directly.
[1]Mynavi Agent CANVAS (survey by VALUE WORKS) — 75% of those who considered a job change but did not change report no regret; half are reconsidering
Reference source
VALUE WORKS surveyed 301 Japanese working adults aged 20-60 who had considered a job change but did not change jobs (online via Lancers, 10-19 October 2024). To the question "Do you regret not having changed jobs?", 75% answered "I do not regret it"; the complementary 25% therefore regret having stayed. The 25% is used directly as the action-side regret rate (regret of staying rather than changing). This replaces a prior figure (45%) that had been misattributed to an En Japan overtime/company-choice survey which, per Nippon.com coverage (nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01676), measured only whether overtime affected company choice and reported no regret data. A material caveat: half (50%) of these stayers report they are still reconsidering a job change, so "no regret" coexists with ongoing dissatisfaction.
[2]Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training (JILPT) — JILPT Research Report No.215: Job Change, Skill Development, and Career Formation of Middle-Aged Workers
Government report
Mid-career job-changers had higher average work engagement and self-evaluations than long-time employees, and holding a professional qualification or licence correlated with better wages after a job change
Excerpt
“A comparative analysis between job changers and long-time employees shows that the former have a higher level of work engagement on average, higher self-evaluations of work performance, and a stronger tendency to have an "autonomous career perspective." Possession of a professional qualification or license was observed to have a statistically significant positive correlation or a trend toward a positive correlation with any of the results such as better wages, a higher job position, and the more effective use of skills and knowledge after job change.
”
Source data from
2022-03-31
Accessed
2026-07-01
Calculation
This JILPT report provides material context for the action-side regret rather than a direct wage figure: it does not quantify a lifetime-vs-changer wage gap. Its comparative analysis finds mid-career job-changers report higher work engagement and self-evaluated performance than long-time employees, and that holding a professional qualification or licence correlates with better wages, a higher position, and greater use of skills after a job change — a plausible driver of the minority (25%) who regret not having changed. This source does not provide a direct regret rate and is supplementary to the VALUE WORKS direct-regret survey above. (An earlier version cited a generic JILPT reports directory and asserted a "15-20% higher pay by age 45" premium that appears in no JILPT report; that unsupported statistic has been removed.)
Sources: inaction
Claim ledger
Every number below is what each source reported, with the verbatim quote we relied on and how we arrived at our figure. Click any link to verify directly.
[1]HRzine (reporting Shikigaku Co. survey) — 59.7% report regret or failure after changing jobs; 'salary lower than expected' most common reason — Shikigaku survey
Reference source
59.7% of recent job-changers said they had felt regret or that they had failed after joining their new employer, most often because salary was lower than expected
Shikigaku Co. surveyed 1,000 Japanese company employees aged 22-59 who had changed jobs within the previous 3 years (online questionnaire, 28-30 June 2022). 59.7% reported they had experienced regret or felt they had failed after joining their new employer; the most common reasons were "salary was lower than expected" (34.7%) and "organizational culture did not fit" (22.8%). The 59.7% is used directly as the inaction-side regret rate (regret of having changed jobs). This replaces a prior 26% figure that had been misattributed to an En Japan overtime/company-choice survey carrying no regret data (per Nippon.com coverage, nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01676).
[2]Nippon.com (reporting Japan MHLW 'Survey on recent graduates changing jobs') — A Third of Japan's University Grads Leave Their First Job Within Three Years
Reference source
33.8% of Japanese university graduates and 37.9% of high school graduates who started work in 2022 left their first job within three years, per the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare
Excerpt
“33.8% of those who graduated from university in March 2022 had left their first job within three years. [...] 37.9% among high school graduates. [...] Due in the part to the increase in job openings in 2021 that followed a drop at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the rate for recent graduates changing jobs announced in 2024 for 2021 graduates reached a 16-year high.
”
Source data from
2025-11-19
Accessed
2026-07-01
Calculation
Japan's Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare "Survey on recent graduates changing jobs" (reported by Nippon.com) finds that roughly a third of the 2022 graduate cohort left their first employer within three years — 33.8% of university graduates and 37.9% of high school graduates — with turnover concentrated in smaller firms and in sectors such as accommodation and food service (55.4% for university graduates). This documents the underlying scale of mid-career/early-career job mobility in Japan that the changing side of this decision draws on. It does not provide a direct regret rate and is supplementary to the Shikigaku direct-regret survey above. (This replaces a prior source — a non-existent "JILPT Report on Youth Employment and Job Mobility in Japan 2022" citing a generic 403 directory URL and unverifiable 19%/8% one-year figures — with a real, government-sourced job-separation statistic.)
Caveats
The two regret rates come from two different surveys with different populations and samples, so the sides are not strictly like-for-like. The action-side 25% is the complement of a VALUE WORKS survey (n=301, Oct 2024) in which 75% of workers who considered but did not change jobs said they do not regret staying — though half of that same group report they are still reconsidering a change, so "no regret" coexists with ongoing dissatisfaction. The inaction-side 59.7% comes from a Shikigaku survey (n=1,000, June 2022) of people who changed jobs in the prior three years; its leading regret reason was "salary lower than expected," and both recruiting-adjacent sources may carry framing bias. Japanese job-change-regret figures vary widely across surveys (other polls report roughly one-in-four job-changer regret), so the 59.7% is at the higher end and should be read as one survey's finding, not a settled rate. A prior version of this entry attributed both rates (45%/26%) to an En Japan survey that, per Nippon.com coverage, actually measured how overtime affects company choice and reported no regret data at all; those figures have been replaced. The Japanese labour market is undergoing structural change: the share of non-regular workers grew from 15% in 1984 to approximately 37% in 2023, so genuine lifetime employment — and this entry's framing — applies to a shrinking fraction of the workforce. The JILPT sources provide material context but do not supply independent regret rates.
