Migration and skill level of information technology engineers in provincial regions

Abstract

In this paper, the authors examine the migration and skill level of information technology (IT) engineers and highlight the characteristics of the labor market in the information service industry in provincial regions. The study is based on a questionnaire survey of IT engineers working in Hokkaido, Tohoku, and Kyushu. Hokkaido, Tohoku, and Kyushu each gain IT engineers who have their origin in other regions. Within the regions, prefectures that contain a regional capital obtain an inflow of IT engineers who grew up in prefectures near the regional capital. Some move to regional capitals when they enter a college or university; others do so when they are employed for the first time. Most job changes are occurred within a prefecture, and several respondents returned to their hometown or a regional capital near the hometown after they had experience in working in metropolitan regions. Those who moved from an adjacent prefecture to a regional capital incidental to a job change were few. These findings show that the labor market for job changers is divided into a local labor market corresponding to a prefecture and a national labor market wherein those who once migrated to metropolitan regions return to provincial regions. A comparison of our study with those of the Japan Institute of Labor (2000) reveals that the skill level of IT engineers is lower in provincial areas than in metropolitan regions. The authors thus assume that the spatial feature of one's working career differentiates the skill level of IT engineers; concretely speaking, IT engineers who have once worked in a company located in a metropolitan region have higher skills than those who have not. However, the results of log-linear analysis does not support the authors' assumption. In other words, the skill level of respondents is independent of the spatial feature of one's working career. The skill level of respondents is related to regions where workplaces were located at the time of the survey. Because the industrial structure of Hokkaido is poor in the manufacturing industry, firms in the information service industry can recruit engineers rather easily in Hokkaido. In addition, people of Hokkaido tend to have an attachment to their birthplace. These can be the reasons why IT engineers working in Hokkaido have relatively high skills. Within Hokkaido, Sapporo gains IT engineers from other areas whose skill levels are relatively high, whereas in Tohoku there is no difference in skill level between those who stay in their home prefecture and those who migrate to Miyagi, which is the prefecture containing Sendai, the regional capital of Tohoku. As mentioned above, some respondents moved between metropolitan and provincial regions, but a small number of IT engineers move between provincial regions. Therefore if there is a difference in the skill level of IT engineers among provincial regions, it is likely that regions with highly skilled IT engineers will attract human resources from other regions. The problem lies in migration between metropolitan and provincial regions and in differences in the skill level of IT engineers between two regions. Every year, many IT engineers move from provincial to metropolitan regions when they enter an university/college or when they graduate and are employed immediately after. Some return to provincial regions after some years of working in metropolitan regions, but few act as a vehicle to transfer the higher skills learned from the experience of working in metropolitan regions. It is rather the case that IT engineers who migrate from provincial to metropolitan regions and have acquired higher skills tend to stay in metropolitan regions. In short, selective migration in terms of skill level can sustain or even expand the difference in skill levels of IT engineers between metropolitan and provincial regions.