Anna Matsushita

 I have been through personal IT literacy revolution within these couple of years. The company I worked 2 years ago was a small company without much information technology. Everything was done in paperwork. Attendance record was kept on paper, and I needed my boss’s signature. I started to work at another company in 2019, and briefly in 2021. The experience between these two years were revolutionary. For the first time in my life, I used online attendance record. Some of the meetings were done by Zoom, which I have also never heard of before. The company still needed to use lot of paper, but it was beginning to be replaced by mobile application. Conversation between branch offices abroad was done on online chat. Phones were replaced by internet phone.   Meeting was announced not by e-mail but by the Outlook invitation. During unemployment, I experienced interviews by Zoom and Teams, as the companies can't let candidate visit their offices. HR were also working from home so

  “ Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes ! “ That is how the opening song of the musical “RENT” goes. 1 year counted in minutes. How have we lived those minutes in 2020 ? In my case, I have never applied for a job vacancy and sent out so many resumes in my life. I practically researched companies every day and wrote why I was interested in their business and the open positions. I think I spent my two hundred and twenty thousand minutes writing resumes and researching companies and applying for job vacancies. Some people told me that a famous astronaut had sent out 1,000 resumes to get a job after his or her flight to the space, and I should follow his/her example. I duly noted the wisdom. Job market in Japan was quite slow from the end of 2020 to the beginning of January 2021. Still, luckily, there were some openings so I could at least try for my chances on them. Looking around, so much seem to have changed and we needed to adopt to so-called “New normal”. Whether you