South Korea’s university graduates are heading abroad to work as job crunch takes toll at home
- The dominance of family-run conglomerates known as chaebol makes South Korea uniquely vulnerable
- At the same time, South Korea is bringing in more foreigners to address an acute shortage of blue collar workers.
Cho Min-kyong boasts an engineering degree from one of South Korea’s top universities, a school design award and a near-perfect score in her English proficiency test.
But she had all but given up hope of finding a job when all her 10 applications, including one to Hyundai, were rejected in 2016.
Help came unexpectedly from neighbouring Japan six months later: Cho got job offers from Nissan and two other Japanese companies after a job fair hosted by the South Korean government to match the country’s skilled labour with overseas employers.
“It’s not that I wasn’t good enough. There are just too many jobseekers like me, that’s why everyone just fails,” said the 27-year-old, who now works in Atsugi, an hour southwest of Tokyo, as a car seat engineer for Nissan. “There are numerous more opportunities outside Korea.”
Facing an unprecedented job crunch at home, many young South Koreans are now signing up for government-sponsored programmes designed to find overseas positions for a growing number of jobless college graduates in Asia’s fourth-largest economy.
State-run programmes such as K-move, rolled out to connect young Koreans to “quality jobs” in 70 countries, found overseas jobs for 5,783 graduates last year, more than triple the number in 2013, its first year.
