A jobseeker looking over wanted notices employment fair in Seoul. (Yonhap)
SEOUL, Oct. 15 (Korea Bizwire) — Half of all job seekers in their 20s are preparing for public service examinations, most of whom are planning to apply for a grade 9 position, according to a recent study.
Many employees are also preparing to take the examination alongside their current work.
Incruit, a South Korean job portal, and Albacall, a part-time job search app, conducted a survey of 968 members, 47.4 percent of whom said they were ‘still looking for a job’.
The 20s age group had the largest percentage of job seekers (54.3 percent).
Roughly two thirds of all respondents said they were either university students or job seekers, indicating that two in three job seekers were preparing for public service examinations, while 45.9 percent said they already had a job.
Among those preparing for public service examinations, 62.3 percent were planning to apply for a grade 9 position. Those applying for grade 7 and grade 5 positions accounted for 22.1 percent and 8 percent, respectively.
As for why they want to work in the public sector, 21.4 percent said so they can have a stable job until retirement age, while 19.2 percent pointed to pensions.
Others said that there were no career alternatives (6.3 percent) or they were merely following the career path that many of their colleagues had taken (4.6 percent).
Another 5.2 percent said they decided to work in the public sector because they failed to get a job in the private sector, while 3.8 percent said that they spent so much time preparing for the public service examination that they were too afraid to move on and pursue a different career.
H. M. Kang (hmkang@koreabizwire.com)
