[IDEA2050_004E]
Ban, Ga Woon(Advisory Researcher of LAB2050, Researcher of KRIVET)
KRIVET(Korea Research Institute of Vocational Education and Training) is national research institute affiliated with the Prime Minister’s Office.
There was a person who did not receive as much limelight as Alpha Go and Lee Sedol during the go match that garnered the attention of the world. It was Aja Huang who moved stones on behalf of Alpha Go, sitting in front of Lee with the go board in between. Even though he is a 6-dan go player, he only moved stones following the direction of Alpha Go. Him doing what he was told and not using his own ability was reminiscent of those living in our society.
Work means many things to a person. It is a mean to earn money and make a living, but it also allows people to develop their skills and grow as a professional. However, several years after scoring a job, workers feel that they are burning themselves out rather than growing. Or some might feel that their job is meaningless and completely irrelevant from the education they had. They would have seen themselves in Aja Huang while watching the go match.
They are numerous Aja Huangs in Korea’s labor market. It is only natural for members of our society to feel anxious for fear that they would turn into Aja Huang in the future.
According to statistics, Korea’s labor market is different from any other markets in the world. The conclusions below are drawn based on the statistical analysis.
‘Korea is the only country where the skills of the employed are inferior to the unemployed among OECD countries.’
‘Koreans loses their cognitive ability a lot faster than other countries.’
‘There is a correlation between education and employment rate, but the correlation between competency and employment rate is not as strong.’
These conclusions render the advice that our society has been telling the youth meaningless. Our society has been telling them to develop their skills or settle for less to get a job.
Why vocational training is not so effective
In the background of this advice is an economic theory which asserts that there is a mismatch between jobs and job seekers. To resolve this issue, suppliers — job seekers — should ratchet up their skills to meet the demands or accept the working conditions lower than their expectations. However, in Korea’s labor market, developing skills does not necessarily lead to a job, and skills deteriorate after landing a job.
The Program for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) provides evidence for such phenomena. This OECD survey targeted 157 thousand adults aged between 16 and 65 in 24 countries. Among the respondents were 6,667 Koreans. Having started in 2008, the program conducted a preliminary survey in 2010, followed by an actual survey in the late 2011 and early 2012.
The analysis of literacy skills and employment rate measured by the PIAAC provides meaningful insights. There is a reason why the program focused on literacy skills. The OECD defines literacy skills as ‘the ability to understand, evaluate, use and engage with written texts to participate in society, to achieve one’s goals, and to develop one’s knowledge and potential’(2013, The Survey of Adult Skills : Reader’s Companion, OECD Publishing),while the literacy measured by the PIAAC is ‘key information-processing skills’ which is overall cognitive ability rather than ‘reading’ skills.
In other words, it is an ability to learn, understand, judge and solve problems. It is more of basic cognitive ability rather than a unique set of skills needed for specific businesses. This ability is needed to learn new tasks in a specific area and respond to rapid technological change and industrial structural reform. It serves as a safety net for individuals.
The table below is the distribution of PIAAC’s literacy skills test scores.
First of all, the cognitive ability of Korean adults showed wider fluctuations compared to other OECD countries. The cognitive ability of Korean students receiving secondary and higher education (from late teens to early 20s) was higher than those in other countries, but those in their 30s displayed lower cognitive ability than the OECD average.
The decrease in cognitive ability was steeper among Koreans than other countries’ citizens. This could be because Koreans have fewer opportunities to learn after school age and a lot of them cannot fully utilize their skills and ability at work. It could also be because of fierce competition and lack of spare time. Many research studies found that a sense of deficiency and pressure significantly reduced cognitive ability.
In Korea, regardless of the government or businesses, the power to make decisions is given based on age and rank. The issue of deteriorating cognitive ability could directly affect the productivity of an organization. Of course, respondents in all countries gradually lost their cognitive ability as they aged since the PIAAC tested general cognitive ability rather than specific skills that accumulate through job experiences. The problem is that the cognitive ability of Korean citizens declined a lot faster than those in other OECD countries.
This aggravates overall macroeconomic conditions. As noted, cognitive ability is a sort of safety net for individuals. Laid-off workers can receive job training and find a new job if they have learning skills. But such opportunities are rarer in Korea. If businesses need to carry out restructuring in a crisis, workers aged 40s and 50s are susceptible to lay-off; however, they are an age group with high training costs with low effects.
Why they should not “settle for less”
Cognitive ability is also important at work. It increases productivity and leads to innovation. However, Korean workers have an exceptionally low cognitive ability. The cognitive ability of the working-age Koreans aged between 15 and 65 is similar to the OECD average. However, the cognitive ability of Korean employees is lower than the average.
In particular, Korean employees scored lower in literacy skills on average (271.9) which was lower than the average score of the general working-age population (272.6). Korea was different from other countries including those with a lower average score than Korea as workers scored higher than the working-age population in other countries. This means groups with lower competency enter the labor market more than the groups with higher competency and highly competent workers lose their competency as they work.
Chances are, this is a result of various factors at play; the ratio of young people and females entering the labor market is low and workers do not have enough opportunities to use their ability. Workers show comparatively low competency, and it drops sharply as they work and age. I characterized Korea’s labor market as ‘low skill balance’ in my previous research.
Korea is a country with an unusually high interest in education. Does high competency guarantee jobs or higher income? Statistics say it does not.
A comparison was drawn on the employment rate of low competency (literacy proficiency Level 1 and Below) and high competency population in OECD countries. The employment rate of Koreans with low competency was 67.0%, the second highest among 21 OECD countries, but that of high competency population was the lowest at 63.2%. This would be closely related to the fact that high competency workers opt for other options such as further education rather than finding employment or it could also be because there are simply not enough decent jobs for them.
Also noticeable differences are the correlation between employment rate, educational attainment, and competency between Korean and other OECD countries. OECD countries showed significant correlations among these three variables. However, in Korea, levels of education and employment rates were correlated, but competency and employment rates were not. This could be because cognitive ability does not affect the employment rate and there are not enough jobs that require high competency.
I created a ‘skill use at work’ index using various skills use indicators provided by the PIAAC. The result showed that Korea has the lowest level of skill use at work. “Korea is at the bottom of OECD countries in the degree of skill use at work among those who have very low proficiency in literacy, and the figure for those with the highest level of proficiency stands at the second lowest after Japan.” The PIAAC classifies respondent’s job with skilled, semi-skilled white-collar, semi-skilled blue-collar, and elementary occupations based on the International Standard Classification of Occupation. Korea displayed the lowest ratio of skilled occupations.
Innovation for meaningful work
Aja Huang’s case is as more symbolic as it might be the future of our society. Since Alpha Go heralded the prelude of the artificial intelligence age, Huang’s existence has been asking our society how humans would live and work in the future.
Would artificial intelligence help humans or replace them in Korea’s labor market that consists of businesses with hierarchal culture and hostile labor relations? Would humans be reduced to the assistance of artificial intelligence?
Our society needs to redefine innovation to tackle the issues in the labor market and change society. So far, innovation at work was concentrated on profits and efficiency. What humans would do in the future was only a secondary issue in the process of innovation? In the period of industrialization, human labor was reorganized by conveyor belts. Humans degenerated into the assistance of machines. Then how would the fourth industrial revolution reorganize human labor?
The innovation I suggest is to allow humans to engage in meaningful work. During the early days of the internet when the competition among web search engines was fierce, Yahoo and Google defined search jobs differently. Yahoo sorted webpages by categories while Google listed webpages in order of most quotes. Users had to categorize each and every webpage themselves on Yahoo, while employees developed algorithms in Google.
Google’s algorithms automatically collected webpages, saved them in the database and listed search results automatically based on keywords. Users might not feel a big difference, but for employees, it determined whether their job was repetitive or creative. Technology can make humans work in a mechanical fashion. The advent of ride-hailing apps made cab drivers’ knowledge on various routes and crowded areas useless and made them follow the direction of the apps. This could be a transitional phenomenon, but it still warrants our attention to how technological shifts would change human labor.
In industrial society, it was natural for humans to separate different phases of life. They learned in school age, worked in adulthood and enjoyed leisure time in old age. However, the role of the state and businesses in modern society should change to balance out learning, work, and leisure throughout people’s lives. The state should provide individuals with stability and reinforce the foundation for learning even for those who are past school age. Businesses need to change hierarchal corporate culture and create an environment where employees can demonstrate their ability. Most of all, their perception of work needs to change — the workplace is where employees develop and utilize their skills.
We also need to pay attention as to who Aja Huang really is. Aja Huang, Alpha Go’s assistance and a 6-dan go player, is one of key experts to design Alpha Go as an artificial intelligence software developer. He was not Alpha Go’s assistance. He was testing the AI system that he designed. This has important implications for meaningful work in the age of the forth industrial revolution. Aja Huang was not a mere proxy, but a computer scientist who participated in the Alpha Go project. At the end, how we define the role of humans may determine the meaning of work.
