キャリアデザインⅡ2026　第3回（人生満足度曲線）

Summary

Course context and purpose

Instructor Ueda opens the third Career Design II lesson by reminding students that coursework and assignments determine their grade, and that the required form should be submitted by the deadline. The main topic is the life satisfaction curve, a way to reflect on past experiences and develop self-understanding.

The lesson connects this activity to career planning. Employers consider both objective information—such as education, age, qualifications, and work history—and subjective characteristics, including personality, values, and ways of thinking. The course will explore these subjective characteristics in several sessions.

Review of résumé homework

Ueda reviews common points from the previous assignment:

• Basic information: Use your current age rather than the traditional Japanese age-counting system. Write your full address, including the prefecture.
• Licenses and qualifications: Use the appropriate name for each qualification. For exams such as the JLPT, record the month results were announced, rather than confusing it with the exam month. Low English-test scores need not be included.
• Qualifications earned abroad: These can be listed on a Japanese résumé, but should be written in Japanese. List qualifications in chronological order, from oldest to newest.
• Education: “Expected graduation” indicates the anticipated year and month of graduation. Ueda says that including high-school graduation is sufficient, and suggests explaining a university departure if it was connected to coming to Japan to study.
• Work history: Describe part-time jobs and internships separately from formal employment history. If you have no employment history, write “None.” If you left a job to study in Japan, Ueda says it is common to state “personal reasons.”

Life satisfaction curve worksheet

Students use the worksheet from the third lesson in their class notes. The graph covers life from birth to the present, with age on the horizontal axis and life satisfaction on the vertical axis:

• Above 0: Satisfaction
• Below 0: Dissatisfaction
• 0: Neither positive nor negative
• The scale runs roughly from +5 (a personal high point) to −5 (a low point).

Students draw two separate curves:

• Task A — Public life: Satisfaction connected with life outside the home, such as school, clubs, teams, workplaces, or part-time jobs.
• Task B — Private life: Satisfaction connected with personal life, such as family, relatives, health, and personality.

The categories are flexible. Students can use their own judgment if an experience seems to fit better in the other category.

Steps for drawing the curves

1. Recall significant experiences from birth to the present, including both enjoyable and difficult periods.
2. Rate satisfaction at different points in time. Mark each point as a black dot on the graph.
3. Connect the dots to show how satisfaction rose and fell over time.
4. Briefly note what happened and how you felt at relevant points, especially when satisfaction changed or reached a high or low point.

List experiences in chronological order: A1/B1 are the oldest memories, and later numbers move toward the present. Students do not need to record exactly nine experiences; fewer are acceptable if they cover meaningful changes.

Ueda shows example curves involving school experiences, bullying, academic progress, family changes, illness, relationships, and university life. These examples illustrate how varied—and sometimes uneven—a person’s life curve can be.

Additional tasks

• Task C: Identify the experience from Task A or B that has the strongest influence on you now. Write its letter and number in the answer box. One choice is expected, though two are allowed. Ueda recommends drafting the answer after completing the curves rather than choosing randomly.
• Task D: Give an overall, subjective rating of your current life satisfaction out of 100. Record the score on both the worksheet and the form.

Looking ahead

Ueda says the curve will help with next week’s work on experiences students have been deeply engaged in or have struggled with. Students will describe what happened, what they thought and did, and what they learned, using the 5W1H framework: when, who, where, what, why, and how.

Speakers and sources

• Shunsuke Ueda — instructor and sole speaker in the subtitles.
• The school, personal-life, and relationship histories discussed in the examples are illustrative worksheet examples presented by Ueda, not accounts from additional speakers.