By Chris Green
Korea has an affliction. You already knew? Ok, so there are a couple of things most foreigners complain about, but this affliction is different. For one thing it only affects Koreans.
Furthermore they are almost exclusively women in their earlyto mid-20. These unfortunate young ladies go to a place where they are drilled in the art of standing straight, placing their hands in front of them, dealing with itinerant foreigners, and repeating memorized answers to English questions.
What is this strange place? Naturally, it is the booming business of “flight attendant” academies. You can see them all over Seoul. These establishments’ sole reason for existing is to provide the industry with a small number of what used to be called, in England at least, “air stewardesses.”
Of course since air travel began, this job has been highly desirable as a way for young, tall and pretty girls to see the world in an exciting and, on the face of it, romantic way.
Many thousands of Western girls continue to apply to a myriad of airlines annually to try their luck in the cutthroat evaluation process. Those who succeed will have a job whose pay is above average and whose benefits are considerable, so it is entirely understandable that girls want to join the profession.
However, Korea is different and it is all wrong. First and foremost, many airlines have contracts with the academies, so there is no direct application procedure and the primary interview is carried out by the academy.
So in order to start the ball rolling, the girls must stump up cash to join one of the big academies, whose inevitable dedication to turning a profit means that they refuse few applicants on the traditional grounds of, for example, height.
So an applicant whose physical nature guarantees she will not be able to achieve her dream is rarely refused, and she spends her money for nothing. Only 0.3 percent of all applicants will ever succeed.
These are ludicrously short odds, so naturally the applicants are never told this. One can see the benefit of the system for the airlines; they don’t need to organize recruitment drives and conduct interviews, and a large amount of training is done for them.
However, it is at the expense of the applicants, who never receive a truthful evaluation of their probable success. Meanwhile, it seems that the process of the interview, when an applicant gets that far, is not in any sense clean or transparent.
For a start, some of these socalled “interviews” are nothing more than a ruse to attract applicants and boost enrolment. If an applicant is fortunate enough to get a genuine interview she still cannot be guaranteed a fair assessment.
One applicant I spoke to, who asked not to be named, told me that she went to the final interview with the airline a number of times, and on one occasion was told unequivocally that she was being selected to work for Emirates, one of the most desirable jobs in the industry.
When I met her I was able to see why; she is tall, broad shouldered and attractive, and her English is excellent. In short, great flight attendant material. However, some days later the happy applicant received a letter from her academy stating that in fact she had not been successful, and would not be working for Emirates after all. No explanation, nothing.
This industry set-up breeds a situation where the best applicant frequently does not win, and the worst applicants are deceived into thinking that their application is something other than a money-making tool for the academies.
I suggest that if a system of direct application to airlines followed by in-house training is good enough for every Western nation that I am aware of, it should be good enough for Korea.
This country’s dedication to education is well documented, and it is frequently a thing of which Korea can be justly proud. However the system of “flight attendant academies” takes this premise too far and corrupts it in the process.
These academies need to stop warping the dreams of young girls who are just seeking an exciting career.
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The writer has an MA in international studies (Asia-Pacific region). His MA thesis was on the subject of inter-Korean relations under former President Kim Dae-jung’s “Sunshine Policy.”