Youth Job Plan Shows Too Big Holes to Float
By Yoon Ja-young
Staff Reporter
Doubts have been cast regarding the effectiveness of the government's plan to ``nurture 100,000 young global leaders,'' announced at the government's crisis management meeting held at the Kwachon Government Complex, Friday.
Top government ministers participated in the meeting, which came up with a package of inflation-fighting and job-creating measures, a virtual carbon copy of a pertinent pledge by President Lee Myung-bak during his campaign last year, despite a sharp turn in the country's economic situation since.
The nutshell of the Ministry of Strategy and Finance's plan is to groom 100,000 young global leaders from 2009 through 2013. Half of them will be employed abroad, with a further 30,000 doing internships abroad, while 20,000 will be dispatched as volunteers.
The ministry announced it would strengthen training, dig up job opportunities abroad, and try to solve visa problems to back up the plan.
The scheme, however, has been criticized by experts in the field as unrealistic and short-sighted. ``A second thought on the plan would reveal that it only adds to the problem. If it is a plan to fight unemployment, one should first think about how to cope with tens of thousands people returning to Korea after training and volunteering ― the potential jobless people,'' said Hansung University professor Lee Tae-joo.
Korea has already expanded the number of young volunteers dispatched abroad to hundreds each year, but many, as well as those who joined the overseas training program, ended up jobless due to the poor system afterward. NGOs criticize that it is reckless to dispatch youths to developing countries to cope with the unemployment problem here.
``The plan without careful preparation will only result in squandering the budget and tarnishing Korea's image overseas,'' said Lee. Another ``nurture 100,000 young leaders'' plan will soon be prepared in future-oriented industries such as finance, culture contents, IT and health.
The Lee Myung-bak administration has ambitiously suggested a 600,000 annual job creation target, but the job market is worsening. The target continued sliding down to 200,000, but even this target seems hard to achieve.
Unemployment among young people reached 6.9 percent, twice as high as the average of other age groups. It takes 11 months on average for a young Korean to get a job after graduation.