Academic and Career Counseling Starting from Elementary School

The government plans to publicize the employment rate of each department and each university starting this year and pursue ways to reflect the rates and universities’ effort to support their students’ employment in university evaluations. It intends to encourage universities to make self-rescue efforts for more youth employment.

It will also create systemic academic and career counseling measures at each academic level; it projects to include academic and career counseling in the curricula of elementary, middle, and high schools and form a human resources pool of parents, businessmen, and experts from various fields and use them as career counselors.

The government on January 28 confirmed the measures for higher youth employment to fight against youth unemployment in the fourth banquet meeting of the Committee on Job Creation and the Special Committee on Youth Job Creation presided over by Prime Minister Lee Hae-chan in the Central Government Complex at Sejong-no, Jongno-gu, Seoul.

Under its plans, the government will operate the “National Committee on Academic and Career Counseling” and “Local Committee on Academic and Career Counseling” to strengthen the infrastructure of the labor market and constitute the “Consultative Meeting for Human Resources Development by Industries” to activate cooperation between industries and universities in which industries, universities, research institutes, and the government will participate.

Yong-Gwan Jung Jong-Hoon Lee yongari@donga.com taylor55@donga.com