A job hunt has been cancelled at the top of South Korea’s official job board due to the lack of demand for skilled workers.
The government has ordered the re-implementation of an “advisory board” for people seeking jobs, as the number of vacancies is far too high for employers to hire enough staff to fill the vacancies.
The announcement came after an investigation by South Korea Media Network found that there were over a million vacancies for jobs in the public sector.
According to the report, the number for the public employment sector in South Korea had been reduced by over half since 2012, from around 2 million to less than 700,000 positions.
“We need more than 5 million skilled workers for the country to be able to produce a good quality product, to be a leader in the global economy, and also to sustain itself as a large economy,” said a government official in charge of the advisory board.
The move comes after a government report in March 2016 said there were only around 10 million vacancies in the country’s workforce.
The South Korean government says the government is working on a national strategy to boost the number and quality of jobs in sectors such as agriculture, construction, manufacturing and health care, among others.
The advisory board is intended to help employers identify suitable candidates and encourage the hiring of new staff.
But according to the South Korean Labor Ministry, more than 70,000 vacancies are already filled.
In a statement, the ministry said that it is not clear how employers are going to fill vacancies if the government does not step up the supply of skilled workers in the future.
The minister said that the government would continue to promote the creation of a national workforce, but stressed that it will not go down to the level of an advisory board to fill a shortfall.
“It is the government’s intention to strengthen the supply and the demand for talent,” the ministry statement said.