Six in 10 Korean job seekers delay full-time applications for internships, boot camps
Nearly six in 10 job seekers postpone full-time applications for internships or boot camps as companies increasingly hire candidates with role-specific experience.
Participants in the LS Jump-Up Bootcamp work on coding exercises after a week of training focused on tools and practical cases used by industry professionals.KIM KYUNG-ROK
About six in 10 Korean job seekers have delayed applying for full-time jobs by three months or more to squeeze in an internship or a job-training “boot camp,” as companies shift toward hiring for specific roles in small batches rather than through mass recruitment drives.
In a survey conducted by the JoongAng Ilbo and career platform Saramin, 56.2 percent of the surveyed 664 job seekers said internships or boot camps had pushed back their applications for full-time positions by three months or more. Another 25.8 percent said three to six months, 16.9 percent said six months to a year and 13.5 percent said more than a year.
A boot camp, in this context, is a short, intensive, full-time job-training program — often three to six months long and sometimes done while living on-site — that teaches practical, job-ready skills in a specific field like coding or engineering.
The most common reason for joining an internship or boot camp was “to build job-related experience,” cited by 36 percent of respondents, followed by “because job posts favor candidates with relevant experience” at 24.7 percent and “to fill out a portfolio” at 20.2 percent.
Employers see it the same way. Asked what job seekers most need, recruiters at 147 large companies cited “job-related experience” — internships, part-time work or projects — most often, at 67.3 percent in a multiple-response survey. Another 22.4 percent pointed to job training programs such as boot camps.
Hiring in small batches by department, rather than through mass open recruitment, has already become the norm. A total of 93 percent of companies surveyed said they hire fewer than 10 people per job post. The job-search industry is adapting accordingly, moving toward services that let job seekers chat with AI to find postings suited to their experience and build a job-search strategy around them. Saramin's “Career Matching Agent” service is one example.
“Open recruitment assumes a company will train new hires after selecting them, but rolling recruitment is closer to hiring people who already have the skills and abilities the job requires,” said Jeong Hyeon-gyeong, a team lead at Saramin. “For young people who lack experience and work history, it can be hard to match immediately with what companies are looking for.”
The number of employed young people between the ages of 15 and 29 has fallen year over year for 46 straight months through last month. Youth employment dropped from 4.04 million in August 2022 to 3.43 million this past August, while the youth employment rate fell from 47.3 percent to 44.1 percent over the same period. Separate from the shrinking size of the youth population itself, the youth employment rate alone fell 3.2 percentage points.
“The biggest reason job placement keeps getting delayed is that companies are offering fewer jobs to young people,” said Jeong Ji-woon, a senior research fellow at the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training. “Job training programs like boot camps are playing a role in keeping young people who still want to work from giving up and dropping out of the labor market altogether.”
This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
