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 recently.
Those classified as not in education, employment or training (NEET) accounted for 36.7% 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 the 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 categorised 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% within six months after graduation but dropped to 36.5% three years after graduation.
The May NEET rate is higher than rates recorded pre-pandemic ― 24% in 2018 and 24.7% in 2019.
The rate continued to climb to 25.5% in 2020, 34.7% in 2021 and 37.4% in 2022, before easing in 2023.
According to a member of NEET People, a non-profit organisation, said on condition of anonymity, though considering the country’s economy is supposedly on a recovery path, there should be far more job opportunities that can encourage the NEETs to search for jobs again but it is still too early to say.
It was noted that the employment rate of those aged 15 and older was 63.2% in Statistics Korea’s data for September 2023.
The rate was up 0.5% 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% after shrinking 0.1% year-on-year. – Korean Times
