Appointing the right people in South Korean Cabinet

Facing polls: Incumbent President moon Jae-in and his Cabinet saluting the South Korean flag before a meeting at the presidential blue House in Seoul - AP

CRITICS have always argued that South Korean presidents all have one serious flaw in common: They fill government posts with people from their own political faction or election ca mp only, regardless of their abilities. As a result, amateurs have run the country, making numerous, sometimes fatal mistakes.

Of course, there have been some outstanding, competent ministers. However, they often could not extend their abilities to their full capacity, blocked by a bunch of amateurs who wielded political power surrounding the president. If Korean presidents had appointed truly capable people to their Cabinets, South Korea would be a much more advanced nation today.

A great leader should have a vision for the future, not a fixation on grudges from the past. Someone who is too preoccupied with past grievances can never become a great leader.

More importantly, a great leader should transcend the gravity of his or her own faction, embracing a “rainbow coalition” of different people. Therefore, a great leader is one who can appoint capable people to important posts regardless of their political stance. And if a leader appoints an able person but does not listen to them, that leader too is not a good leader.

The late Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple, offered sound advice for all leaders when he said, “It doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

Likewise, the president of a country should also appoint smart, capable men and women, and then listen to them and support them.

To the leader who does not like smart people and favours flattering, incompetent people instead, David Ogilvy, founder of renowned PR and marketing firm Ogilvy & Mather, has this to say: “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.”

A nation’s leader, too, can turn his or her country into a place of dwarfs if he or she does not appoint smart, competent people.

To the leader who only likes his/ her own kind from his/her own faction, the great Honda Soichiro of Honda Motor Co admonished, “If you hire only those people you understand, the company will never get people better than you are. Always remember that you often find outstanding people among those you don’t particularly like.”

That is why a great leader should not hesitate to appoint capable people to the Cabinet, even if they are not “one of our own”.

In a sense, the president of a country is like the president of a company. Both should have competent staff members to make their institutions flourish. The only difference between the two is that unlike a company president, a nation’s president should be diplomatic and embrace even political dissidents. If the president of a nation wants to work with ideological followers, school friends or hometown associates only, he or she cannot become a great leader and will consequently ruin the country.

At Seoul National University (SNU), I led three major institutions for eight years. At each institution, I appointed truly able specialists to help me run the institutions successfully. In fact, I helped them work freely to the full because they, not I, were the experts in their fields. Thanks to these extremely competent experts, my institutions thrived as among the best SNU institutions.

However, problems occurred when the administrative assistant, whom the university appointed, worked clumsily. For example, once my administrative assistant reported to me that since we needed more space, we should close down the big office for emeritus professors. As I had just taken office and did not know the situation well enough, I consented without giving it much thought. Alas! That was a bad idea and a fatal mistake.

You never disappoint or maltreat emeritus professors under any circumstance; they deserve our full respect and esteem. Unfortunately, I was too young to know it and, unwittingly, I became the target of harsh criticism due to the thoughtless administrative assistant. At that time, I came to realise how important it was to have smart, thoughtful staff members.

Recently, Koreans have become concerned about the country being divided into two main competing presidential election camps ahead of elections in 2022. If the newly-elected president follows in the footsteps of predecessors and appoints these partisans to important government posts despite their ineptitude and incompetence, South Korea will never be able to put an end to the evil cycle of nepotism. And amateurs will ruin the country once again.

We strongly hope that the new president finds and appoints truly capable professionals to his or her Cabinet and secretariat, regardless of their political background. Only then can South Korea be on the right track and prosperous. – The Korea Herald/asia News Network

By KIM SEONG-KON, A Professor emeritus of English at Seoul Nntional University and a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College, United States.

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In a tough market, young South Koreans vie for the security of government jobs

Bureaucratic staying power:  While boy band BTS may be going places (no, that Grammy award is not theirs), a government survey shows that one in four middle-school students in South Korea dream of one day becoming not K-pop star or the next Steve Jobs, but that 'adjussi' in the civil service - Reuters

Desire for stability: Many South Koreans worry far more about jobs and the economy than they do about the nuclear threat from North Korea, like this jobseeker at a jobs fair in Seoul last November. — AFP

South Korean Finance Minister Hong Nam-ki, third from left, makes remarks at a meeting on reviving the economy at the government complex in Seoul on Jan. 9, 2019. (YONHAP / EPA-EFE/REX)

In a tough market, young South Koreans dream for the security of government jobs instead of tech innovation and K-pop success.

For more than three years, Kim Ju-hee has been studying full time for an exam that feels like her only shot at a good life in South Korea.

She’s lost count of how many times she’s taken the nation’s civil service exam and failed — though she knows it’s been at least 10. The 26-year-old is not sure what she’ll do if she fails again, so she figures that spending more than eight hours a day studying for her next try, on April 6, makes sense.

Kim hopes to become a government tax clerk, which offers a starting salary of about $17,000, and work for the government until retirement.

“There just aren’t other good jobs,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Seoul, where she lives with her parents.

The most sought-after careers among teenagers and young adults in South Korea, Asia’s fourth-largest economy, are government jobs they can count on to get them to their golden years, not jobs innovating and helping companies grow in the private sector.

Analysts say it’s a symptom of the nation’s slowing economic growth and competition from China in export-driven industries that young South Koreans, about a fifth of the 51 million population, are flocking to what they consider risk-free government jobs not vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the economy. The situation is particularly concerning because it was private companies in sectors like electronics, autos and shipbuilding that fueled South Korea’s rapid growth from one of the world’s poorest nations in the 1960s into an economic powerhouse, analysts say.

Many young people in South Korea say they don’t expect nongovernment job prospects to improve anytime soon despite a host of measures announced by South Korean President Moon Jae-in nearly a year ago to boost employment, including government stipends to companies.



South Korean President Moon Jae-in, right, puts on a safety helmet during his tour of a hydrogen plant in Ulsan, South Korea. Critics have pointed to the lackluster economy to say the president should be focusing on bettering South Korean lives, engaging with North Korea. (YONHAP / EPA-EFE / REX)

Unemployment among those ages 15 to 29 reached 11.6% last spring — a level Moon called catastrophic, compared with a jobless rate that hovered between 3% and 4% for the rest of the country’s workforce. Taking into account young adults who are working part-time jobs or studying for an employment exam like Kim, nearly 1 in 4 are out of a job. By comparison, in the U.S., unemployment among those ages 15 to 24 fluctuated between 8% and 9% in 2018. South Korea uses a different age bracket to calculate its youth unemployment because of mandatory two-year military service.

The desire for stability and security starts so young that 1 in 4 middle school students say they dream of one day becoming not a K-pop star or the next Steve Jobs, but a public sector bureaucrat, according to a government survey from 2017.

Many South Koreans worry far more about jobs and the economy than they do about the nuclear threat from North Korea. Conservatives in South Korea who are critical of Moon’s efforts at detente with North Korea point to the economy, saying his focus should be on bettering lives in South Korea, not on engaging with the North.

Competition for South Korea’s 1.07 million government jobs is fierce. In one round of exams Kim took last year, more than 200,000 people applied, and the 4,953 highest-scoring candidates were hired for open positions — an acceptance rate of 2.4%. By comparison, Harvard’s 2018 acceptance rate was 4.59%.

Kim Y.H., 22, who is about to graduate from college in February with a degree in Japanese, recently began studying for a civil service exam to become a customs agent. She said the popularity of public sector jobs was a sign that her generation is pessimistic about South Korea’s economic outlook.

“The country won’t guarantee your future, even if you’re a college graduate,” she said. “So of course we want to go with the most stable path that’s out there.”

There isn’t the expectation that you’ll grow or get good treatment in the private sector. People choose stability over risk or challenge. Joo Won, economist

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One research report published last year estimated that as many as half a million South Koreans were studying for civil service exams full time instead of working. In 2017, the Hyundai Research Institute estimated that the economic cost from the lost work potential of so many young people spending years studying to get government jobs, rather than joining the private workforce, was more than $15 billion.

Moon’s administration has tried to encourage employment among young adults by paying small and medium-sized businesses to hire them, and by offering government-matched savings programs for young workers. He has also pledged to add 174,000 government jobs by 2022 to meet the heightened demand.

Some analysts, however, say the administration’s stopgap measures won’t do much to fix the problems underlying the push for government jobs.

“There isn’t the expectation that you’ll grow or get good treatment in the private sector. People choose stability over risk or challenge,” said Joo Won, one of the authors of the Hyundai study. “There are only so many public sector jobs the government can create. It won’t fix the situation.”

Many analysts point to the widening gap between the behemoth family-owned conglomerates that dominate the South Korean economy, such as Samsung and LG, and other companies. Large corporations including the chaebol, as they are known, accounted for about half of the revenue in South Korea in 2017 but provided only 20% of the jobs in the country, according to the most recent figures available from the government. And while their share of the economy grew, the number of jobs they offered dropped, because of consolidation and downsizing within the corporations amid the economic slowdown.

 

A Samsung flag and South Korean flag outside the Samsung building in Seoul in January. Analysts say part of problem for young job seekers in South Korea is the widening gap between the quality of jobs at family-owned conglomerates like Samsung and the rest of the players. (Jung Yeon-je / AFP/Getty Images)

That polarisation means stark disparity in income and working conditions between those employed by the conglomerates and those employed elsewhere – with starting salaries at large corporations averaging about US$36,000 (RM 146,370), compared with approximately US$24,000 (RM97,580) at smaller companies – fuelling intense competition for a decreasing number of coveted jobs. “The world was harsher than I thought,” she said.

“If you work for a small or medium-sized company, you become a second-class citizen” with a fraction of the income, long hours and poor benefits, said Kwon Soon-won, a business professor at Sookmyung University in Seoul.

Those without the impressive resumes increasingly needed for jobs at the top companies — internships, perfect grades, proficiency in a foreign language or three — are turning to civil service exams.

Applicants to civil service exams tripled from 1995 to 2016, according to a report by the Seoul Youth Guarantee Center. One online bookseller said it saw a 73.5% increase in sales of civil service exam prep books in 2016 compared with the previous year.

Kwon said South Korea’s high education level is part of the problem — although 70% of those ages 24 to 35 have college degrees, the economy hasn’t kept pace by creating enough quality jobs to meet the increased expectations of those graduates.

Kim Eun-ji, 26, certainly feels that way. With an economics degree from Chung-Ang University, a top-10 college in Seoul, she applied to more than 50 jobs at a wide range of companies big and small but never got past first-round interviews.

“If I think about how many people there are like me in the country, it just feels pointless,” she said, leaving an employment center in Seoul.

She has been studying for a government-issued computerized accounting license to better her employment prospects. Among her friends who graduated around the same time she did in early 2016, only about half are employed full time, Kim said.

Her roommate, who keeps deferring her college graduation, has been making a modest but steady income publishing romance novels online, which strikes her as a more viable option at a steady income than traditional employment.

As a kid, Kim Ju-hee had dreamed of becoming a singer or a teacher. But as an eighth-grader, hearing how hard it was to get a stable job, she set her sights on becoming a bureaucrat.

She’s gotten close to giving up, occasionally applying to other jobs or working part time here and there. But she worries that if she gives up, she’ll have spent years of her life in vain because none of what she studied for the exam will be useful for other jobs.

   By Victoria Kim - Los Angeles Times

Contact

---

Victoria Kim reports from Seoul, South Korea, for the Los Angeles Times. Since joining the paper in 2007, she has covered the state and federal courts and the Korean community in Los Angeles. Her work has included investigations on the cover-up of the sex abuse scandal in the Los Angeles Archdiocese, killing of unarmed suspects by the Inglewood police, underpaid workers in the garment district and unaccredited law schools in California. She has previously written for the Associated Press in South Korea and West Africa, as well as the Financial Times in New York. Victoria was raised in Seoul and graduated from Harvard University.


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In a tough market, young South Koreans vie for the security of government jobs

Bureaucratic staying power:  While boy band BTS may be going places (no, that Grammy award is not theirs), a government survey shows that one in four middle-school students in South Korea dream of one day becoming not K-pop star or the next Steve Jobs, but that 'adjussi' in the civil service - Reuters

Desire for stability: Many South Koreans worry far more about jobs and the economy than they do about the nuclear threat from North Korea, like this jobseeker at a jobs fair in Seoul last November. — AFP

South Korean Finance Minister Hong Nam-ki, third from left, makes remarks at a meeting on reviving the economy at the government complex in Seoul on Jan. 9, 2019. (YONHAP / EPA-EFE/REX)

In a tough market, young South Koreans dream for the security of government jobs instead of tech innovation and K-pop success.

For more than three years, Kim Ju-hee has been studying full time for an exam that feels like her only shot at a good life in South Korea.

She’s lost count of how many times she’s taken the nation’s civil service exam and failed — though she knows it’s been at least 10. The 26-year-old is not sure what she’ll do if she fails again, so she figures that spending more than eight hours a day studying for her next try, on April 6, makes sense.

Kim hopes to become a government tax clerk, which offers a starting salary of about $17,000, and work for the government until retirement.

“There just aren’t other good jobs,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Seoul, where she lives with her parents.

The most sought-after careers among teenagers and young adults in South Korea, Asia’s fourth-largest economy, are government jobs they can count on to get them to their golden years, not jobs innovating and helping companies grow in the private sector.

Analysts say it’s a symptom of the nation’s slowing economic growth and competition from China in export-driven industries that young South Koreans, about a fifth of the 51 million population, are flocking to what they consider risk-free government jobs not vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the economy. The situation is particularly concerning because it was private companies in sectors like electronics, autos and shipbuilding that fueled South Korea’s rapid growth from one of the world’s poorest nations in the 1960s into an economic powerhouse, analysts say.

Many young people in South Korea say they don’t expect nongovernment job prospects to improve anytime soon despite a host of measures announced by South Korean President Moon Jae-in nearly a year ago to boost employment, including government stipends to companies.



South Korean President Moon Jae-in, right, puts on a safety helmet during his tour of a hydrogen plant in Ulsan, South Korea. Critics have pointed to the lackluster economy to say the president should be focusing on bettering South Korean lives, engaging with North Korea. (YONHAP / EPA-EFE / REX)

Unemployment among those ages 15 to 29 reached 11.6% last spring — a level Moon called catastrophic, compared with a jobless rate that hovered between 3% and 4% for the rest of the country’s workforce. Taking into account young adults who are working part-time jobs or studying for an employment exam like Kim, nearly 1 in 4 are out of a job. By comparison, in the U.S., unemployment among those ages 15 to 24 fluctuated between 8% and 9% in 2018. South Korea uses a different age bracket to calculate its youth unemployment because of mandatory two-year military service.

The desire for stability and security starts so young that 1 in 4 middle school students say they dream of one day becoming not a K-pop star or the next Steve Jobs, but a public sector bureaucrat, according to a government survey from 2017.

Many South Koreans worry far more about jobs and the economy than they do about the nuclear threat from North Korea. Conservatives in South Korea who are critical of Moon’s efforts at detente with North Korea point to the economy, saying his focus should be on bettering lives in South Korea, not on engaging with the North.

Competition for South Korea’s 1.07 million government jobs is fierce. In one round of exams Kim took last year, more than 200,000 people applied, and the 4,953 highest-scoring candidates were hired for open positions — an acceptance rate of 2.4%. By comparison, Harvard’s 2018 acceptance rate was 4.59%.

Kim Y.H., 22, who is about to graduate from college in February with a degree in Japanese, recently began studying for a civil service exam to become a customs agent. She said the popularity of public sector jobs was a sign that her generation is pessimistic about South Korea’s economic outlook.

“The country won’t guarantee your future, even if you’re a college graduate,” she said. “So of course we want to go with the most stable path that’s out there.”

There isn’t the expectation that you’ll grow or get good treatment in the private sector. People choose stability over risk or challenge. Joo Won, economist

Share quote & link

One research report published last year estimated that as many as half a million South Koreans were studying for civil service exams full time instead of working. In 2017, the Hyundai Research Institute estimated that the economic cost from the lost work potential of so many young people spending years studying to get government jobs, rather than joining the private workforce, was more than $15 billion.

Moon’s administration has tried to encourage employment among young adults by paying small and medium-sized businesses to hire them, and by offering government-matched savings programs for young workers. He has also pledged to add 174,000 government jobs by 2022 to meet the heightened demand.

Some analysts, however, say the administration’s stopgap measures won’t do much to fix the problems underlying the push for government jobs.

“There isn’t the expectation that you’ll grow or get good treatment in the private sector. People choose stability over risk or challenge,” said Joo Won, one of the authors of the Hyundai study. “There are only so many public sector jobs the government can create. It won’t fix the situation.”

Many analysts point to the widening gap between the behemoth family-owned conglomerates that dominate the South Korean economy, such as Samsung and LG, and other companies. Large corporations including the chaebol, as they are known, accounted for about half of the revenue in South Korea in 2017 but provided only 20% of the jobs in the country, according to the most recent figures available from the government. And while their share of the economy grew, the number of jobs they offered dropped, because of consolidation and downsizing within the corporations amid the economic slowdown.

 

A Samsung flag and South Korean flag outside the Samsung building in Seoul in January. Analysts say part of problem for young job seekers in South Korea is the widening gap between the quality of jobs at family-owned conglomerates like Samsung and the rest of the players. (Jung Yeon-je / AFP/Getty Images)

That polarisation means stark disparity in income and working conditions between those employed by the conglomerates and those employed elsewhere – with starting salaries at large corporations averaging about US$36,000 (RM 146,370), compared with approximately US$24,000 (RM97,580) at smaller companies – fuelling intense competition for a decreasing number of coveted jobs. “The world was harsher than I thought,” she said.

“If you work for a small or medium-sized company, you become a second-class citizen” with a fraction of the income, long hours and poor benefits, said Kwon Soon-won, a business professor at Sookmyung University in Seoul.

Those without the impressive resumes increasingly needed for jobs at the top companies — internships, perfect grades, proficiency in a foreign language or three — are turning to civil service exams.

Applicants to civil service exams tripled from 1995 to 2016, according to a report by the Seoul Youth Guarantee Center. One online bookseller said it saw a 73.5% increase in sales of civil service exam prep books in 2016 compared with the previous year.

Kwon said South Korea’s high education level is part of the problem — although 70% of those ages 24 to 35 have college degrees, the economy hasn’t kept pace by creating enough quality jobs to meet the increased expectations of those graduates.

Kim Eun-ji, 26, certainly feels that way. With an economics degree from Chung-Ang University, a top-10 college in Seoul, she applied to more than 50 jobs at a wide range of companies big and small but never got past first-round interviews.

“If I think about how many people there are like me in the country, it just feels pointless,” she said, leaving an employment center in Seoul.

She has been studying for a government-issued computerized accounting license to better her employment prospects. Among her friends who graduated around the same time she did in early 2016, only about half are employed full time, Kim said.

Her roommate, who keeps deferring her college graduation, has been making a modest but steady income publishing romance novels online, which strikes her as a more viable option at a steady income than traditional employment.

As a kid, Kim Ju-hee had dreamed of becoming a singer or a teacher. But as an eighth-grader, hearing how hard it was to get a stable job, she set her sights on becoming a bureaucrat.

She’s gotten close to giving up, occasionally applying to other jobs or working part time here and there. But she worries that if she gives up, she’ll have spent years of her life in vain because none of what she studied for the exam will be useful for other jobs.

   By Victoria Kim - Los Angeles Times

Contact

---

Victoria Kim reports from Seoul, South Korea, for the Los Angeles Times. Since joining the paper in 2007, she has covered the state and federal courts and the Korean community in Los Angeles. Her work has included investigations on the cover-up of the sex abuse scandal in the Los Angeles Archdiocese, killing of unarmed suspects by the Inglewood police, underpaid workers in the garment district and unaccredited law schools in California. She has previously written for the Associated Press in South Korea and West Africa, as well as the Financial Times in New York. Victoria was raised in Seoul and graduated from Harvard University.


Related posts:

Vanishing Jobs Growth Spells Deep Trouble for South Korea

  

5,000 Malaysians are illegals in South Korea, lured by higher pay, living underground !

 

South Korea can’t tackle new Trump Order alone, be prepared new Trump order !