The rapid aging of Japan’s population continues apace, bringing with it a rise in the number of people leaving the workforce to care for family members and an increasing interest among personnel management in making it possible for employees to perform both work and elder care duties. This paper analyzes the results of a survey asking what support corporations and workplaces must offer in order to allow workers to reduce the anxiety about caregiving duties and whether they will be able to keep their jobs. The survey analysis highlighted the following points:

First, the number of employees who are currently responsible for providing care is more than 10 percent of those in their 50s. However, measures to support working caregivers, including family care leave, are very rarely utilized. With nearly one third of male employees not even discussing their care duties with their employers, it is possible corporations and workplaces are not sufficiently aware of the employees who bear such responsibilities. Many corporations treat the work/care balance issue as a consideration for the future, but they must take into account the some employees who are already shouldering care responsibilities and tackle the issue today. Furthermore, work/care support measures are underutilized, and even when a system is implemented, it is often not being used effectively.

Secondly, many employees indicate that even if they do not currently care for a family member, they are anxious about the possibility of having to do so in the future. Less than 30 percent of employees believe they can continue working at their current company once they assume the role of family caretaker. However, with 90 percent of employees wishing to continue in their jobs, there is a significant gap between employee hopes and prospects. If they do continue working, few employees claim that they will “make use of the leave system to provide family care for oneself,” whereas the majority say that they will “balance both work and caregiving by using flexible working systems while continuing to work as usually as possible”. Many employees want to stay in their jobs and continue working without taking long leaves. An examination of work/care support measures reveals that devising a diverse working style that would allow employees to fulfill their work responsibilities while also carrying out their family care duties is even more essential than increasing the length of family care leave.

Finally, I discuss what is necessary to reduce the anxiety employees feel about caregiving duties and whether they will be able to keep their jobs. I found that a thorough understanding of the work/care support measures in place at one’s workplace is connected to one’s prospects of being able to continue in one’s current position. To achieve this goal, corporations must first introduce work/care support measures and promote employee understanding of the benefits they provide. Initiatives at the workplace level above and beyond these support systems, including comprehension in one’s workplace and adequate work management and task assignment, are needed to reduce anxiety about future care responsibilities and give employees the prospect of continuing in their positions even while providing family care. In particular, a workplace atmosphere where employees can discuss family care goes a long way toward reducing anxiety about caregiving and one’s prospects of continuing in one’s position.

How do Japanese white-collar workers develop their “abilities to work”? In order to support their developments, how could “qualifications” be used? They are questions when this research was started. In 1990s, global competitions and information system progress would force Japanese organizations to change their personnel systems to diversified employments by portfolio and merit based HR systems. Career educations and job consciousness of new college graduates were increased. It might make clear job careers if job-specific employment would be adopted for newly graduates, however, they may suffer limitations of their future careers.

“Qualifications” could be utilized to connect careers to jobs. In Europe and USA, job-specialties were established at many positions in organizations. Accordingly, qualifications have been used significantly. On the other hands, it will need more time that Japanese qualifications, especially those for white-collars such as Business Skills Test to be utilized.

In this paper, current situations of qualifications for white-collars, practical uses in companies, preceding related researches are described. Then, HR qualifications of Japan, US and UK are introduced by samples of qualifications for white-collars to be compared in their purposes, contents, evaluating methods for consideration. Japan’s Business Skill Test (HR Div.), SHRM’s PHR of US and CIPD’s CPP of UK are picked up for the comparative studies. These three HR qualifications are similar to their targets and contents; however, they are different in histories, backgrounds, numbers of applicants and social evaluations. Japanese one seems to be different in many aspects from counterparts of US and UK.

Based on the survey of jobs and qualifications to white-collar workers in Japan, US and UK, results of evaluations about qualifications are analyzed and compared. Merits of qualifications are found in salary increases and job-changes in US and UK responses, but these advantages are not so found in Japanese responses. In spite of such situation, the ratio of qualifications’ holders among Japanese white-collars is similar to those of US and UK ones. Moreover, Japanese respondents show stronger intentions to take more qualifications in the future than American and British counterparts.

It seems to be difficult for Japanese society to quickly set up professional associations and qualifications like in US and UK. So it might be more practical that Japan’s public organizations lead to prepare and establish qualifications for white-collar workers. In order to utilize qualifications, they need to include proper contents from practices at work. It should also require job experiences and OJT to prepare and use new qualifications, which might lead to develop “abilities to work”. More studies of overseas job qualifications and their proper adoptions to Japan will be required. Japan’s national supports to vocational educations and trainings are also expected.

This paper analyzes the effects of supervisors' behavior toward employee satisfaction (ES) during a period of HRM systems (HRMS) reform, implementation and actual operation. Using 4-term-panel micro-data on workers in one Japanese medium-sized firm, it provides two findings. First, supervisors' behavior in workplace has positive effects on ES (for overall, working conditions, and job satisfaction). Second, it is proved that HRMS reform and related measures for supervisors improve their behavior in workplace. This indicates that the results of HRMS reform should be examined by not only considering design of the HRMS, but also considering actual behavior of supervisors through operation of new HRMS.

In this paper, a fuzzy set model for self-proximity analysis of rating is proposed, in order to quantitatively analyze mental distances between raters and ratees in self-rating(self review) and mutual-ratings among coworkers(peer review). The proposal model aims to simply describe the relation between self-rating and mutual-ratings to very familiar coworkers or not so familiar ones. The feature of the model is that the mental positioning to the coworkers is quantified by the membership value (the self-approachability) of “fuzzy set”. It becomes possible to quantify raters’ mental distances to ratees in mutual-ratings among coworkers by the above fuzzy set model.

Then, the self-approachability of the mutual-ratings among the coworkers is analyzed as an application example of the proposal model, using the result of “the analysis model of mutual-rating among the coworkers and self-rating” in the past study (Yamashita, 2005). Through the analysis of the proposal model, this paper implicates that the mental positioning of the ratings to the very familiar coworkers in the mutual-ratings is brought close to the positioning of the self-ratings.