But the closest he has ever been to these dreams was just a three-month-long internship at a marketing startup last summer. Jang said he has submitted applications to hundreds of companies for a full-time job, but all he received were emails starting with “We are sorry to inform you.”
“It looked so easy to find a job and work like a slave for countless hours every day, and I usually spent time contemplating what job to choose as opposed to how to land one,” Jang said, calling himself as a “loser.”
“Last year’s job search didn’t turn out successful, so I have no option to continue living with my parents. They nag me all the time, so I don’t even go outside my room that often.”
Jang is one of many jobless Koreas in their 20s and 30s who are facing increasingly limited prospects for the future as Korea undergoes a prolonged period of slow expansion.
That trend accelerated with the start of coronavirus pandemic, as companies locked their doors to new hires and stayed conservative in face of diminishing business outlook. The job hunt accordingly became extremely competitive.
According to a Korea Economic Research Institute survey of 4,158 college students and graduates in October, 55.5 percent of respondents said they do not expect to land a job in the coming months.
Close to 76 percent of respondents said finding a job became more challenging than a year earlier, with many of them citing fewer number of openings for full-time jobs and internships.
As such misfortunes continue, Korea suffered the worst job loss in 22 years in 2020, as the number of those employed dropped 218,000 from a year earlier to 26.9 million.
The largest annual job loss on record was 1.27 million jobs in 1998 when the Asian financial crisis took a harsh toll on the economy.
And in the face of such hardships, more and more people are giving up on the idea of landing stable employment, resorting to part-time jobs and short, temporary gigs to earn income, however small it may be.
“This is going to be my third year of searching for a job after college, but I came across only a handful of job openings from my dream employers in the last recruiting season,” said a 27-year-old job seeker surnamed Nam who graduated college as a finance major in spring 2019.
“I’m really disappointed and frustrated with how the job situation is going for me. At this point, all I want is a job that can pay me just enough for survival.”
According to Statistics Korea data, the number of those in their 20s and 30s who did not actively search for jobs reached 731,000 people last month, up 31 percent from the same month a year earlier.
With such trend in force, experts worry…
Read More: [Feature] ‘Lost decade’ possible for South Korea as employment prospect