Exploring what people studied and the work they do now

When you are deciding what to study, the lives of people already at work can offer useful clues. What did they study, and what knowledge do they now engage with? Rokugeisha’s field network is a way to explore those connections for yourself.

We particularly hope it will be useful to students considering their next step into high school or university. When choosing a path, you cannot know every field you may eventually encounter. Looking at the work of people who have gone before you can nevertheless help you imagine some of the possibilities that may follow from what you study.

Each node represents a field. Each line connects a field selected for educational background with one selected as related to current work. “Work” here does not refer to a job title. It refers to the fields respondents identified as closely related to what they do.

Start with “Explore all fields” and look at the pattern of lighter and darker lines. Then choose a field you enjoy, one you are studying, or simply one whose name catches your attention. You can select it from the list above the diagram or click its node directly.

Selecting a field reveals connections in two directions. Blue lines lead from that field to the fields people who studied it now engage with at work. Yellow lines arrive from the fields studied by people who identify the selected field as closely related to their work. The two lists below the diagram show the five combinations with the largest counts in each direction, within the current display settings.

For example, select “Educational studies, educational administration and school management” with the year set to 2025 and the group set to “All respondents”. Among the work-related fields selected by people with this educational background, “Accounting and bookkeeping” appears alongside fields related to education. Twenty-two people selected this combination. Looking in the other direction, 27 people who selected educational studies, educational administration and school management as related to their work had selected “Japanese literature” as their educational background.

These two numbers alone do not tell us their occupations or career histories. What kinds of work brought people who studied education into contact with accounting? How might a background in literature connect with someone’s current work? Finding a line gives us a concrete question to ask.

Move to a field that interests you, and a different set of connections comes into view. “Go back” returns you to the previous state, while “Clear selection” lets you view the whole network again. You can use the diagram to explore, following connections that catch your attention, as well as to look for a particular answer.

You can also change the year or gender group while keeping the same field selected. The nodes stay in place, making it possible to compare how the lines appear. Their intensity, however, is based on person counts, without adjusting for the size or composition of the groups. A darker line cannot by itself be read as an increase in demand or in the value of studying a field.

We want this diagram to provide material for thinking about the connections between learning and work. When a person’s field of study differs from the fields they now engage with, there is a period of their life between those responses. We hope the visualization will prompt readers to imagine that time, which the survey does not record, to talk with people they know, or to examine their own interests.

“There are many ways to live.” We want to make some of that variety visible. We have started with the relationship between learning and work.

Open the field network