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Jeong Dong-wook, director of Statistics Korea’s employment stats division, announces the results of a survey on youth unemployment at the Government Complex in Sejong on July 22. (Yonhap News)

There are 1.66 million young people (aged 15-29) in South Korea who can’t find a job or aren’t working for other reasons even after graduating or dropping out of their final level of schooling, a government survey finds — and 400,000 of those young people are just idling away the time.

These figures appeared in the youth supplement to the May 2020 Economically Active Population Survey, released by Statistics Korea on July 22. According to the survey, 35% of young graduates and dropouts (1,600,000 out of 4,787,000) are unemployed. This figure was 120,000 higher than the same month last year, repres

enting the highest level since record-keeping began in 2007.

When asked about the length of unemployment, 57.5% of unemployed youth said they’d been out of a job for less than a year, up 1.6 points from last year, while 16.9% said they’d been jobless for 1-2 years, down 1.3 points. Longer unemployment periods saw modest declines, with 8.8% jobless for 2-3 years (down 0.3 points) and 16.8% jobless for 3 or more years (down 0.1 points).

The most common activity of unemployed youth was “vocational training and employment exam preparation,” reported by 630,000 (38%). The second most common activity was “just passing the time,” reported by 397,000 (23.9%), while 236,000 (14.2%) said “job hunting” and 158,000 (9.5%) said “raising children and doing housework.”

The share of unemployed youth in vocational training and employment exam preparation fell 0.8 points from last year, while the portion just passing the time was up by 2.3 points. Statistics Korea said there are more idle youth this year because of the COVID-19 outbreak, which has led to the cancellation of employment exams..

The survey found that 3,127,000 graduates and dropouts are employed, down 168,000 from last year. A large percentage of young people are employed in the following sectors: business and the personal and public service sectors (41%), wholesale, retail, F&B, and hospitality (25.2%), and manufacturing (16.1%).

By Lee Kyung-mi, staff reporter

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