Yoon Ja-young is in charge of articles translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times. She is interested in improving the newspaper through AI.
One in 10 change jobs
A total of 2.6 million people changed their jobs last year. This means one in 10 changed jobs. / Yonhap
By Yoon Ja-young
By Yoon Ja-young
One in four people who changed jobs last year were forced to do so due to massive layoffs and other reasons.
According to the household financial and welfare survey data compiled by Statistics Korea, Financial Supervisory Service and the Bank of Korea, 24.9 million people had jobs in 2013. Among them, 2.6 million people said they had changed jobs within the same year. This means that one in 10 people changed their jobs
When asked why they did so, 39.8 percent cited personal reasons while 19 percent said they were dissatisfied with working conditions.
However, 718,000 said they made the decision to change jobs against their will.
The number of people forced to change jobs increased by 100,000 last year from the previous year.
A total of 384,000 people were forced to change jobs due to layoffs, while 334,000 said that they had found new jobs when their contracts expired.
The low-income households were especially hit hard by the massive layoff. Among those in the bottom 20 percent of the income bracket, the number of people who changed jobs due to layoff recorded 65,000, or 2.5 times more than the previous year.
The number of people who cited expiration of their contract as a reason stood at 111,000, 24,000 more than last year.
The older workers are also likely to be forced to change jobs. Among those below 30, only 9.7 percent changed jobs due to layoffs, but this ratio rose to 12.7 percent for those in their 30s, 19 percent for workers in their 40s and 19.5 percent for those in their 50s and older.