Lee Hae-rin is a City Desk reporter at The Korea Times, covering social issues, tourism and taekwondo. She is passionate about speaking up for the rights of minorities, including women, LGBTQ+, people with disabilities and animals as well as discovering the latest makgeolli trend in town. Feel free to reach her at lhr@koreatimes.co.kr.
INTERVIEW Korea must treat foreign elder care workers as skilled pros, not cheap labor, experts warn
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By Lee Hae-rin
As shortfall of elder care workers projected to be 116,000 by 2028, Korea urged to follow Japan's model
As Korea continues down the path of a super-aged society and grapples with growing labor shortages in elder care, one migration policy expert is urging the government to move beyond short-term fixes and build a system like Japan’s — one that treats foreign caregivers as skilled professionals rather than low-wage, disposable workers.
By 2028, Korea is projected to face a shortfall of roughly 116,000 elder care workers, according to government and industry data. With older adults already accounting for more than one-fifth of the population — 10.84 million people, or 21.2 percent as of 2025 — the country is firmly a super-aged society.
“Even now, the situation is extremely serious,” Kim Dong-seon, a visiting professor in the department of tourism and wellness at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, told The Korea Times in a recent phone interview. She recalled visiting the state-run Seoul Nursing Home, operated by the National Health Insurance Service (NHIS), where the waiting list was several times the facility’s capacity, yet beds still sat empty.
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies visiting professor Kim Dong-seon / Courtesy of Kim Dong-seon
“They cannot fill all the beds because they cannot recruit enough care workers,” the professor explained. “Legally, facilities must meet the required staffing ratio of 2.1 residents per caregiver before they can admit more people. But on the ground, operators already feel the crisis every day.”
Kim led a new study on foreign caregivers in Japanese elder care facilities, published in the Korean Journal of Immigration Policy and Administration. Based on in-depth interviews with 13 stakeholders — including workers from Indonesia, the Philippines and Myanmar, as well as facility managers, local officials and labor brokers — the study shows how foreign caregivers initially struggle but gradually adapt and advance when supported by a strong system.
Japan’s experience
Japan’s experience offers valuable lessons, although Kim cautioned against direct replication. Many foreign workers in Japanese nursing homes initially faced intense homesickness, language barriers and cultural misunderstandings, but coordinated institutional support helped bridge those gaps, her study found. Crucially, multiple actors rallied around a shared goal: helping foreign workers earn the nationally recognized care worker credential.
The payoff has been tangible. In one local survey cited by Kim’s paper, 69.8 percent of respondents said foreign care workers provided higher-quality services than their Japanese counterparts, with more than 43,000 now working via Economic Partnership Agreement programs and skilled worker visas in the elderly caregiving sector.
“Japan started from a very skeptical place,” Kim said, recalling interviews conducted with Japanese operators in 2016 and 2017. “People said, ‘This won’t work. The language is too hard. The exam is impossible.’ But when I went back last year for follow-up interviews, I heard over and over that the satisfaction was very high.”
Facility managers told her they would rather shoulder higher costs to secure foreign caregivers than leave rooms empty because they could not hire anyone at all.
A senior resident and her caregiver look out the window at an elderly nursing home in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, Oct. 16, 2025. Korea Times photo by Ha Sang-yun
Rocky start
Korea has only just begun to experiment with foreign labor in the elder care sector, and the early steps have been fraught.
In 2024 and 2025, Seoul formalized pathways for foreign elder care through the E-7-2 visa, a “skilled” track that places trained caregivers in licensed facilities with wage protections and strict quotas. To secure this pipeline, a 2026 pilot program will launch dedicated caregiver degree tracks at 24 universities, transforming foreign students into a specialized labor force.
Kim argued that bringing in foreign elder care workers is now “not a choice but a necessity” for Korea, echoing trends in other aging societies where up to 20 percent of the care workforce is foreign-born. But she stressed that simply importing workers into the existing system — with low pay, heavy workloads and a rigid, rules-driven care culture — is not the way to go.
Kim Ock-nyu, professor of social welfare at Sookmyung Women’s University, who co-authored the study, emphasized that the structural problems run deeper than recruitment numbers suggest.
Sookmyung Women's University professor Kim Ock-nyu / Courtesy of Kim Ock-nyu
“The current labor shortage is not because there is an insufficient number of people with care worker credentials,” Kim Ock-nyu explained. “Rather, low wages and poor working conditions mean that even those who obtain credentials do not enter the field or cannot sustain employment. Without solving this problem, if we proceed from the mindset of ‘Koreans avoid this job, so let’s replace them with foreigners,’ then foreign workers will also come to perceive caregiving as an undesirable occupation.”
Korea’s current care aide qualification can be obtained after 340 hours of training, with little in the way of structured career progression, even for those who have worked in the field for a decade or more.
“There is almost no recognition of expertise,” Kim Dong-seon said. “The prevailing mindset is, ‘Why would elder care require professional skills?’”
A care worker wipes away tears while testifying about workplace abuse during a press conference at the National Human Rights Commission of Korea in Seoul, in this file photo from April 27, 2021. The worker alleged that she was fired after defending herself against verbal abuse from a resident, only to be reported for elder abuse. Korea Times file
To modernize the industry, advocates suggest leveraging overseas recruits to overhaul certifications and training, effectively turning a labor shortage into an opportunity to upgrade the profession’s standards and wages for everyone.
“Whether they are Korean or foreign, once workers reach a certain level of skill and knowledge, that should be formally recognized and reflected in their career and wages,” Kim Dong-seon said.
She also called for a cultural shift inside long-term care facilities.
Korea’s long-term care insurance system has fostered a climate of “compliance over care,” where the heavy hand of NHIS regulation forces operators to focus more on avoiding sanctions than on fostering resident autonomy.
Kim Ock-nyu also stressed the need to make implicit workplace norms explicit.
Korean caregiving culture emphasizes emotional relationships, hierarchy and family-like dedication — expectations that are rarely clearly documented.
“Forms of address, greeting etiquette, how to refuse requests, how to respond to family complaints — these should not depend on workers ‘reading the room,’” she said. “Documentation and instructions must use simple Korean, not jargon, benefiting not only foreign workers but the entire organization by reducing errors.”
Senior residents receive rehabilitation treatment at an elderly care home in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, Oct. 16, 2025. Korea Times photo by Ha Sang-yun
The authors said that rather than cycling through temporary labor, Korea should let facilities lead their own recruitment and training. This shift requires a “whole-of-government” approach to visas and social policy, offering foreign caregivers a career, not just a stint.
Kim Ock-nyu warned that treating foreign workers as low-wage, short-term labor “may look cheap on paper, but the social costs actually grow” as frequent turnover leads to “more falls, more medication errors, more emotional distress, more complaints and higher management costs.”
The core question for policy, she added, “is not whether we use foreign workers, but whether we can build a care system where anyone can stay in the job for a long time and earn the trust of the people they serve.”