SEOUL, November 5 (AJP) —South Korean jobseekers with university degrees are looking to the factory floor amid a prolonged youth employment squeeze, with production, on-site and quality-control jobs topping their career choices in a survey released Thursday.
A September survey of 500 jobseekers in their third year of university or above by VinuLabs Insight, operator of the Everytime campus platform, found that 20.2 percent preferred those roles.
Marketing, advertising and public relations followed at 13.4 percent, planning and strategy at 12.4 percent, and software development, IT and data at 11.0 percent.
The appeal of manufacturing was accompanied by a strong preference for the country’s semiconductor giants, whose AI-driven growth has made them standouts in an otherwise uneven job market.
Samsung Electronics topped the preferred-employer list with 27.6 percent of first-choice responses, followed by SK hynix at 16.8 percent. Naver and Kakao trailed at 8.6 percent and 2.4 percent, respectively.
In a separate hypothetical comparison, 59.0 percent of respondents chose semiconductor research positions at Samsung or SK over professional careers such as law or accounting.
Financial rewards remained the leading consideration when choosing a job, cited by 57.4 percent of respondents in a multiple-response question. Work-life balance followed at 53.2 percent and job stability at 41.4 percent.
But the semiconductor-led manufacturing recovery has yet to translate into a broad improvement in employment prospects for young people.
A Bank of Korea (BOK) study released on Oct. 26 found that the rate at which workers aged 15 to 29 enter permanent employment, relative to those aged 30 to 59, had declined by about 15 to 20 percent from earlier levels.
BOK researchers attributed much of the deterioration to an industrial shift toward IT manufacturing, particularly semiconductors, where strong production growth has not generated a comparable increase in permanent hiring.
They also pointed to employers’ growing preference for experienced workers, partly associated with the spread of artificial intelligence.
September employment figures illustrated the gap between the manufacturing rebound and opportunities for younger workers.
Manufacturing employment increased by 16,000 from a year earlier, its first annual gain in 27 months, according to the Ministry of Data and Statistics. Yet the employment rate among people aged 15 to 29 fell 1.1 percentage points to 44.0 percent.
The VinuLabs findings capture career preferences rather than actual hiring outcomes. Comparable year-earlier figures for individual job categories were unavailable, so the survey does not establish whether production-related roles have become more popular.
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