ITEE was first administered in 1969 by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (currently METI). ITEE is becoming one of the largest-scale national examinations in Japan, and to date more than 15.4 million people have taken this examination and approximately 1.78 million have passed. The large scale of ITEE offers ample evidence that people take this examination to measure their own IT capabilities.

 The objectives of ITEE are 1) to create goals for IT engineers and provide motivation to improve individual technical competence; 2) to set clear skill criteria for IT engineers, thereby contributing to the establishment of educational standards in school education, vocational education and corporate in-house education; and 3) to establish objective criteria for companies and government agencies to evaluate IT engineers’ skills and competence upon employment, with the aim of raising the social status of qualified engineers. ITEE is widely used and highly valued by businesses and schools as a way to ascertain and improve one’s skill levels.

 ITEE was extensively revised starting with the spring 2009 examination. The purpose of this revision was to build objective human resource evaluation mechanisms based on the Common Career/Skill Framework and to also ensure consistency with the three types of skill standards. Along with this revision, we established the Information Technology Passport Examination that tests the basic IT knowledge of regular workers.

 A total of 12 examination categories, ranging from entry-level tests to examinations covering comprehensive technologies, have been established. Passing the examination allows for the objective certification of IT knowledge.

• The new ITEE can be used as a criterion for determining Common Career/Skill Framework levels. Basically, the new ITEE can determine capabilities from levels one to three, while level four can now be determined by the combination of new ITEE and business experience.
• The Information Technology Passport Examination was established as a level-one examination.
• The human resources categories of user and vendor, which were separate categories under the former examination system, have been revised and a unified examination system has been instituted.
• In response to the rising importance of embedded systems, the examination incorporates a wide range of testing categories related to knowledge and skills about embedded systems, which were included within a specific examination classification in the previous examination.
• To enhance convenience for exam takers, for the Information Technology Passport Examination we aim to introduce a method that allows the examination to be taken using a personal computer.
• For the advanced-level examination, we reorganized and consolidated the number of exam classifications to nine compared with 11 categories in the previous examination.
• The scope of questions was revised to reflect the latest technology trends.

ITEE is mutually recognized as equivalent to that in each of 11 economies of India, Singapore, Korea, China, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Taiwan, Malaysia and Mongolia. This is one of the Japanese policies aimed at supporting IT human resources development in each economy and raising mobility and promoting effective use of IT human resources. The objectives of mutual recognition are as follows:

• To evaluate the competence of IT engineers in Japan and respective economies using common criteria
• To provide an indicator of competence of IT engineers to show when they join companies outside their own economy
• To enable IT companies in operation overseas to reduce costs and risks when they employ local engineers
• To make it easier for IT companies in operation overseas to form business alliances for software development

Based on this mutual recognition, work visa requirements for entry into Japan are relaxed to the passers of the examination in respective economies. Since April 2006, the common exam has been conducted in the six Asian economies of the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar, Malaysia and Mongolia. This examination comprises the same questions and is equivalent to the Fundamental Information Technology Engineer Examination in Japan, along with being conducted at the same time on the same day. In addition, the Information Technology Passport Examination is scheduled to start in these six economies in 2010.