Education may handicap Korea in future

Korea’s global talent competitiveness declining

By Kim Jae-kyoung

SINGAPORE ― A poor education system is a major stumbling block to South Korea’s future as it is undermining its talent competitiveness, according to Paul Evans, professor emeritus at INSEAD, one of the world’s leading business schools.

He called on South Korean President Moon Jae-in to speed up educational reform to globalize the country’s talented young people and ensure gender equality and leadership opportunities for women.

“The slowness of educational reform as well as change in the hierarchical culture of Korean enterprises may handicap Korea in the future,” Evans said in an interview.

“It is well known that Korea’s sophistication on the high tech scene is not matched in its talent and human capital arena, except at the high end,” he added.

He pointed out that there is a shortage of skilled technicians that handicap small businesses because technical education is undervalued.

“Korea’s excessively regimented schools are more suited to factory standardization of the 20th century rather than learning the needs of the 21st century,” he said. “The Korean economy remains quite closed on the talent front.”

According to the 2018 Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI) announced Tuesday by INSEAD during the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Korea ranked 30th in the world, down from the previous year’s 29th.

It is the lowest among Asia’s high-income group countries, behind Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and Malaysia.

The GTCI is an annual report that evaluates 119 nations on their competitiveness based on the talented people they can grow, attract and retain.

In particular, the latest index shows that the quality of Korea’s formal education system has dropped from 21st to 25th place.

In Evan’s view, Korea is near the top of the OECD’s PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) scores for math, literacy and individual problem-solving but Koreans are poor at collaborative problem-solving.

This means that Koreans are often ill-equipped to collaborate with others who are different from themselves.

Evans, the academic director and co-editor of the GTCI, said that collaborative problem-solving will become a vital fourth criterion for evaluating schools.

“To capitalize on the diversity which we know is key to innovation, collaborative problem-solving is vital for the future in a world that must become more inclusive,” he said.

“A diverse group of reasonably smart people will outperform a team of similar Einsteins.”

Diversity matters

Evans, who serves as the Shell Chair of Human Resources and Organization Development at INSEAD, said that equally vexing is the failure of Korea to accelerate the openness of its talent scene.

“Its external openness has declined as reflected in decreasing brain gain attractiveness, as has its internal openness to people from less privileged backgrounds as well as women,” he said.

In 2018, Korea is one of the least open countries in the world for leadership opportunities for women _ 117th out of 119 countries.

“This is cause for concern in an era where we are becoming aware of how important diversity is for creativity, innovation and high performance, and where demographic changes mean there is a declining workforce population,” he said.

“Although the Korean government is well aware of the need for change that benefits the broader population, these social reforms have been painfully slow.”

Evans stressed that Korea should come up with long-term plans to reform its education system and improve talent competitiveness.

For an explanation of Korea’s disappointing rank on talent competitiveness, he said, “Perhaps we should look at the greater instability of governments in Korea.”

“Korea has time and time again looked for quick fixes that rarely do more than scrape the surface with a short term time horizon in mind.”

The veteran professor suggested that Korea take a lesson from Singapore that started to reform its school system in the late 1990’s and has always been an open economy.

In 2018, Singapore is the world’s second-most talent-competitive country, the only Asian country on the top 10 list.

“In Singapore, the changes that led to its continued position as second in talent competitiveness were led by a stable government that had a long-term vision of the future, leading to engagement of the whole population in the need for deep reform.

In the 2018 GTCI, Switzerland was ranked No. 1, followed by Singapore, the United States, Norway and Sweden.