Understanding learning and work through the survey’s fields of study

The human resources survey data published by Japan’s Cabinet Office include responses in which people select fields of study. What have they studied? Which fields are closely related to their current work? What would they like to study if given the opportunity? We became interested in these questions as a way to explore the connections between learning and work.

Rokugeisha’s field network connects two of these responses: the field people studied and the fields they identify as closely related to their current work. This article explains what the nodes and lines represent, beginning with the survey and the way we have organized its categories.

Four perspectives in the survey

The 2025 questions approach fields of study from four main perspectives. The following table summarizes the questions; it does not reproduce their wording verbatim.

Perspective	What the question asks
Educational background	One field studied in a laboratory or similar setting, or given the greatest emphasis, during the education leading to the respondent’s highest qualification
Relationship to current work	Up to three fields closely related to the respondent’s current work
Business development	Up to three fields expected to become important for new developments and growth in the business activities in which the respondent is involved
Interest in further study	Up to two fields the respondent would like to study if given the opportunity now

These questions ask about different relationships. Educational background is more than the name of a faculty or department. A field’s relationship to current work is not itself a measure of its importance or of the respondent’s proficiency. The response about business development reflects the individual’s view, rather than an official position held by their company as a whole.

The choices cover a wide range of areas, including Japanese literature, accounting and bookkeeping, and infectious diseases. The 2025 list contains 299 entries, including “Other”. Of these, 298 name specific fields; responses such as “None” are provided separately where applicable to the question. Some entries group several areas together. The list therefore does not represent 299 distinct disciplines defined at a uniform level of detail.

Approaching the fields through Japanese high school subjects

We began by reorganizing the list around subjects and courses taught in Japanese high schools. Here, a subject is a broad area such as science or commerce; a course is a more specific unit within it, such as physics or bookkeeping. We included both subjects familiar from general education and areas taught in specialized programs, such as agriculture, industry and technology, commerce, nursing, and welfare.

For example, we provided a route to Japanese literature through Japanese language, to statistics and data science through mathematics, and to infectious diseases through health and physical education. Accounting and bookkeeping can be approached through the bookkeeping course within commerce. These connections do not mean that a high school course covers an entire specialist field. They offer a way to move from familiar learning toward the wider knowledge beyond it.

In our initial arrangement, we identified connections to high school courses that we could readily explain for 209 of the 299 entries. Of these, 109 can be approached through general subjects and 100 through specialized subjects. This is an editorial proposal by Rokugeisha, not an official classification used by the survey or the school system. Nor is it the result of checking the contents of individual textbooks one by one.

Providing ways into fields that do not fit readily within school subjects

For entries that were harder to relate directly to high school courses, we considered the objects of inquiry and methods involved. We organized 88 entries under six headings.

Way into the fields	Examples
Connecting fields	Systems engineering; quantum information theory and quantum computation theory
Understanding through mathematics and computation	Natural language processing; econometrics and economic statistics
Organizing knowledge around a subject or problem	Aerospace engineering; service engineering
Understanding people, society and culture	Social psychology; medical sociology
Examining learning and education	Educational studies, educational administration and school management; sociology of education
Investigating life, disease and medicine	Specialist areas of the life sciences and medicine

Some explanatory parts of the field names have been omitted from this table for readability. The remaining two entries are “Drafting and design practice”, for which we are still considering a suitable place, and “Other”, whose content cannot be identified from the response. We retain every original entry.

These headings do not establish a hierarchy of knowledge. Fields connected to high school courses also encompass specialist research and work across disciplines. Our aim was to provide several ways into the knowledge, asking where a reader might most easily begin to understand it.

Representing the responses as a network

In the network, we retain a separate node for each original field rather than aggregating the responses into the larger groups described above. For each respondent, we connect the one field selected for their educational background to the up to three fields selected as closely related to their current work. We then count the people who selected each combination. The count on an individual line represents people, but one person may contribute to several lines. Adding the counts across lines therefore counts some people more than once.

The current visualization includes the 2014 and 2025 data. There are 42,339 respondents with both educational-background and work-related responses in 2014, and 64,544 in 2025. These figures do not represent all respondents to each year’s survey or Japan’s entire working population.

We mapped the choices across years using the 2025 list as a reference. We did not, however, allocate responses from earlier, broader categories to later, narrower ones by inference. We retained 12 earlier categories as separate entries. Together with the 298 specifically named entries from 2025, they form a common set of 310 nodes. An outlined node indicates that the field was not offered as a separate choice in that year.

The placement of the nodes also incorporates Rokugeisha’s editorial decisions. Drawing on the high school subjects and related ways of organizing the fields, we gently directed them toward four broad areas: “Language, culture and society”, “Mathematics and information”, “Nature, materials and technology”, and “Life, health and everyday living”. Connections between fields also informed the layout. Node positions stay fixed when the year or gender selection changes. Distances between nodes are not measurements of the similarity of the knowledge or the value of the fields.

What this visualization shows is the relationship between learning and current work as expressed in respondents’ selections. It does not record their intervening career histories or how they acquired their knowledge. Line intensity uses the same scale of person counts throughout, without adjustment for differences in the number or composition of respondents across years or gender groups. With these conditions in view, we invite readers to explore the connections with us.

Source: Cabinet Office of Japan, e-CSTI analysis and open data on human resources (in Japanese). Organization and processing: Rokugeisha.

Open the field network

Browse the 2025 options and retained legacy categories in Japanese and English