While most South Koreans wish to become public servants, in reality they strive to land jobs in the corporate world, a survey showed Friday.
According to a Saramin HR, South Korea’s online job recruiting matching platform that surveyed 1,143 adults on job preferences, 66.6 percent of 404 job seekers answered that their desired job and their actual target did not match.
The most desired jobs for Korean adult men and women are as public servants or office workers. (Saramin HR)
To a question asking which jobs they desired the most, irrelevant to how realistic it was, 26.7 percent said working at public entities. Multiple choices were allowed.
The next most popular roles were running a business such as a cafe or restaurant, with 16.2 percent, a desk job with 15.0 percent, artist with 11.4 percent, jobs with expertise such as attorney or doctor with 11.4 percent, technician with 9.9 percent, video content creator with 9 percent, entertainer with 7.4 percent and novelist with 6.4 percent.
More than 95 percent of those who said they desired to become public servants did so because the job would secure them stability. Some 35.9 percent of those wishing for a spot in the corporate world also cited stability as the reason.
To a question what types of jobs that they want and thought they could land in terms of possibility, 49.5 percent said desk jobs. Following were 32.2 percent of those that cited public servants and 15.1 percent technicians.
Most, or 41.8 percent said stability was the prioritized factor in setting job targets.
Saramin said that the trend in Korea remains that people prefer stability in the jobs they sought. They, however, added that new types of jobs such as content creators and webtoon artists being included in the top 10 desired job list also shows the changes in the job market.
By Lee So-jeong (xojeong2@heraldcorp.com)
