More young people give up job search

Students walk past a banner promoting job recruitment at a university in Seoul, Sunday. Yonhap

About 80,000 Koreans aged 15 to 29 were not employed and effectively gave up looking for jobs or acquiring additional training to get hired over the last three years, data showed on Sunday.

Those classified as not in education, employment or training (NEET) accounted for 36.7 percent of the 218,000 people in the same age range who have been unemployed for three years or longer as of May this year, according to Statistics Korea.

“Simply put, nearly four out of 10 Koreans aged 15 to 29 are classified as NEETs,” the stats agency said.

In Korea, those of working age are regarded as long-term unemployed if they have not been employed for at last three years.

Under the circumstances, the data shows the serious state of NEETs, in the midst of shifting economic realities and the nation's fast-dwindling population, according to job experts.

They noted that NEETs are categorized as those who are unwilling to seek work after repeatedly failing to secure jobs, and thus, not even counted when calculating the workforce, both active and inactive, in the job market.

Many of these long-term unemployed people have college degrees. But the longer they go without gaining employment after graduation, the higher the likelihood of them giving up on finding a job altogether.

Their rate for actively seeking employment was 53 percent within six months after graduation but dropped to 36.5 percent three years after graduation.

The May NEET rate is higher than rates recorded pre-pandemic ― 24 percent in 2018 and 24.7 percent in 2019.

The rate continued to climb to 25.5 percent in 2020, 34.7 percent in 2021 and 37.4 percent in 2022, before easing this year.

“It would still be risky to say the problem of NEETs is settling, considering the country’s economy is supposedly on a recovery path and that there should be far more job opportunities that can encourage them to search for jobs again,” a member of NEET People, a non-profit organization, said on condition of anonymity.

She said excluding NEETs from the workforce also “leads to another question of whether the employment data can be reliable in making the most out of the all available labor force to cope with the slowing growth and demographic change.”

She noted that the employment rate of those aged 15 and older was 63.2 percent in Statistics Korea’s data for September.

The rate was up 0.5 percent from a year earlier, marking the highest for any September since the statistics agency began compiling related data in 1982.

The unemployment rate also went down to its lowest level for any September, hitting 2.3 percent after shrinking 0.1 percent year-on-year.

During the cited period, the employment rate for those aged 15 to 29 slid by 0.1 percent to 46.5 percent. The unemployment rate for the same age group dropped by a larger margin, falling by 0.9 percentage points to 5.2 percent.