Young Koreans look to work abroad to improve prospects

Participants of the Youth Dream Center’s “K-Frontiers” program say they do not seek work overseas only because it was difficult to land jobs in Korea.

Lee Hyeong-seop, 22, was admitted as a business major by a prestigious university in Korea after graduating from high school, but he boldly gave up entering college to take a job overseas, something he had long dreamed of.

While working as a public service agent in lieu of his compulsory military service, he is preparing to enter a university abroad. He has received admission to King Saud University of Saudi Arabia, and is waiting for an answer from a Malaysian university. “Though I make the same amount of effort, I would achieve more in working overseas, where economies are growing faster than that of Korea,” he said.

Many Korean youths are seeking employment overseas, especially in Latin America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East, regions showing robust growth despite the global economic doldrums, rather than places with stagnant growth including North America, Europe and Japan.

Many Koreans were spotted at University Indonesia, the top national university in the Southeast Asian nation, when the K-Frontier expedition team visited there Feb. 21. They were students preparing to land jobs in Indonesia while learning Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of the country, at the university.

Song Ryun-gwang, an assistant general manager at LG International Corp., which entered the Indonesian market in 2007, said, “Among the 65 Koreans working at our company’s overseas branches, we hired 25 in Indonesia,” adding, "As the scale of our business expands, demand for Koreans who can speak Indonesian will increase as well."

Young jobseekers also attended an international policy conference of the Korea Sharing Program, which aims to share Korea’s economic developmental experience to developing countries and is hosted by Korea’s Strategy and Finance Ministry and Korea Development Institute.

Indonesia accepted advice on water management policies from Korea, and conducted projects including the construction of the Karian Dam and the Batam sewage treatment plant and improvement of irrigation facilities in the western region. Korean companies have also actively taken part in these projects.

Lee said, “I realized that many Indonesian companies seek to learn Korea’s economic development strategy,” adding “If Korean companies expand their presence in Indonesia, more local jobs (for us) will be available.”

○ Disdain for smaller companies persists abroad

The tendency of young Koreans to shun working for small and medium-size companies is also present in Indonesia. PT.UFU is a shoe manufacturer that employs more than 4,500 people in the Tangerang industrial complex, about 40 kilometers east of central Jakarta.

CEO Lee Seok-tae displayed a negative view of young Koreans seeking employment in Indonesia. He hired two young Koreans who majored in Bahasa Indonesia last year, but both quit a year later. They both got a job at a branch office of a Korean conglomerate in central Jakarta.

“Korean college students seek to land jobs overseas because they have little chance to get jobs at conglomerates in Korea, right? We won`t hire Koreans because even if we hire them, they will jump at the chance to work for a conglomerate,” CEO Lee said.

Another problem is that jobseekers who are hired by subsidiaries of Korean conglomerates often end up complaining about the gap in wages and welfare benefits vis-à-vis Korean staff stationed there or dispatched from headquarters. One 31-year-old Korean woman who moved to Indonesia as a middle school student was hired by an Indonesian subsidiary of a Korean conglomerate after graduating from an Indonesian university. “Because I`m an employee hired locally, I get paid less than staff stationed there or dispatched from headquarters even if I do the same work, and we have little welfare benefits in housing and transportation. Certain ethnic Koreans in Indonesia enter conglomerates in Korea and study for the Test of English as Foreign Language to move again to Indonesia.”

A source at an Indonesian subsidiary of a Korean conglomerate said, “Welfare benefits for employees hired locally are inevitably different from staff who are dispatched from headquarters because the former are hired based on the assumption that they have local livelihoods.”