[비즈한국] “I completed a 6-month training program for free, which would have cost about 5 million won. Once I got my foot in the door, I realized that for non-majors, getting hired by a major corporation still comes down to your educational background. Setting aside major corporations, there are barely any developer roles being hired for right now, and for non-majors, the situation is literally frozen.”
Entered coding with government funding, but the ‘jobless’ reality remains the same
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the value of the IT sector soared as non-face-to-face demand surged. A coding craze erupted among everyone from university students to office workers seeking career changes. Neologisms like ‘Na-Ka-Ra-Ku-Bae’ (Naver035420, Kakao035727, Line Plus, Coupang, Baedal Minjok) and ‘Dang-To-Jik-Ya’ (Danggeun, Toss, Zigbang, Yanolja) were coined to refer to companies offering high salaries and excellent benefits to recruit developers.
The developer shortage, caused by IT talent demand outstripping supply, served as a catalyst for young job seekers to enter the world of coding. Government-funded training programs promising ‘coding education for non-majors with no experience’ and ‘employment at major corporations through state support’ flourished, and coding boot camps (short-term intensive courses) costing around 10 million won also surged.
Jang (27), a business school graduate in Seoul, applied for a government-funded program late last year and completed a Java web developer course this year. Since he was a non-major, he paid out of his own pocket to take prerequisite courses he was advised to take. Even when Jang began his coding education, there was already talk among aspiring developers that ‘the last train had left,’ but he decided it depended on his own capabilities. “I felt a lot of anxiety as the job market tightened,” Jang said. “Even if it wasn't an entry-level position at a major corporation, I thought it was a career path where I could build practical experience, develop my career, and move to a better position later.”
Jang has been applying even to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) posting developer openings, but employment remains out of reach. “I went all-in on studying and job preparation for developers this year, but it didn’t work out,” Jang said. “Even the success stories I hear are mostly from experienced ‘junior-level’ hires or those with related degrees. Almost everyone I know who is preparing is in the same boat.”
The era of ‘courtship’ is over, replaced by screening for top specs; consistent criticism of ‘government-funded’ education
The ‘developer courtship,’ which heated up enough to change the first digits of entry-level salaries, has failed to recover since cooling off last year. Due to the global economic downturn and a shrinking investment market, major IT firms and startups are no longer hiring, or are reducing their intake of, both entry-level and experienced developers. According to a report by the IT recruitment platform WantedLab376980, incumbents cited ‘a reduction in hiring scale at their current company/team (29.3%)’ as the biggest change in the IT landscape last year. In a survey regarding job hunting and changing jobs, the highest percentage of respondents (42.9%) answered that it was ‘more difficult than before.’
In reality, recruitment postings have frozen. An analysis of job postings on the top-tier recruitment platform Jinhaksa Catch showed a total of 133 web development and programming-related job postings over the week starting on the 15th. Among these, only 14 were open to entry-level applicants. Of those, 3 restricted applications to computer science or related majors, and 3 of the remaining 11 were for short-term contract positions.
Foreign companies are no different. During the same period, the foreign job recruitment site People & Job had 50 developer job postings, all seeking experienced staff with at least 3 years of experience. Only one of these stated that entry-level applicants could apply if they graduated from a ‘computer/electronics-related department’ in university.
A developer with 7 years of experience at a major corporation assessed the current IT hiring market by saying, “To be precise, the bubble has burst.” He argued that the developer labor shortage was not limited to a sudden surge in demand for IT talent, and that the issue had been oversimplified. “The problem at the time was a lack of talent with the competence to be immediately deployed into practical work. That should have been resolved, but with the focus on high salaries, the industry concentrated on bringing in new developers. Now, incumbents are seeing lower wage increase rates, and the job-changing market has become difficult,” A said. “Companies hired in a hurry when they were desperate, but once they did, they found that many were not capable of handling practical work, which seems to have created a vicious cycle for hiring non-majors.”
A startup official explained, “There are many applicants who have completed government-funded training or boot camps and submit portfolios built there as their main achievements. However, coding is a field where you have to study even more on the job. Once you reach a certain level, there are many problems that are difficult to solve without background knowledge in the major. This applies to majors as well. You can become a developer in 6 or 8 months, but since the limitations show, we consider various factors.”
There is also consistent criticism that the quality of government-funded education is low compared to the curriculum. As the developer market fluctuated, the government stepped in to encourage coding employment, leading to a mushrooming of government-funded coding academies, while their competitiveness, such as instructor capability, remains low. Park (29), who completed a 7-month full-stack course in September, said, “The instructor was changed in the middle, and two replacement instructors with completely different styles handled the remaining two months of the course. Practical training was at the level of following examples, and the Java program lecture, which wasn't even touched upon in the curriculum, was neglected, leading to poor understanding among students.”
In principle, the ‘Tomorrow Learning Card,’ which helps with vocational training, can provide up to 3 million won per person for 5 years from the date of issuance, but IT is classified as a ‘nationally focused fostering field,’ so it provides full support beyond the limit. Given that the Ministry of Employment and Labor supports the operation of educational institutions with tax money, there are calls for systematic and professional education.
Every year, 16,000 to 20,000 computer science majors graduate, but there is a perspective that cultivating professional developers is a separate issue. Seo Jung-yeon, a distinguished research professor at Sogang University (Chair of the Talent Cultivation Committee at LG AI Research), said, “It is greedy to expect to produce good developers through short-term academy education. Even majors become experts while learning their work in the field.” Professor Seo noted, “However, the ‘Innovation Academy,’ an alternative educational institution that encompasses non-majors, is a good example. It is a government innovation education institution that intensively trains developers at a master’s degree level for two years, and it is expanding from the capital region to Gyeongsan, North Gyeongsang Province. This can be evaluated as a short-term model with at least some guarantees.”