`No Substance` in IT Human Resources Education

``It takes three to four months to find human resources for the software development. The official education program is not helpful for the practical business affairs. Thus, human resources are introduced through the personal connection.`` Kang Eun-Soo, a team-director of NamoInteractive pointed out that the government’s plan to educate IT human resources is irrelevant to the demands of the business circles. The government produces `assistant` human resources for information retrieval and webmaster, without producing human resources for the development of mobile technologies, like JAVA programmer.

- Not enough high-quality human resources: According to the analysis of JobKorea (www.jobkorea.co.kr), a job information company, among eight IT related jobs, plenty of jobs are available for programmers. However, most job applicants consist of web designers and webmasters. While competition rate of the employment was 1.57:1, it was 2.71:1 for webmasters and 3.25:1 for character designers. Kim Hwa-Soo, the representative of JobKorea said that ``human resources who have a good command of new technology is in absolute shortage, while the web-related human resources are too many.`` This is the outcome of the quantity-centered policy. Professor Jang Duk-Chul (Computer Technology) pointed out that ``since the support of the government has been concentrated on the easy fields, such as web or e-business, it has not helped to improve the IT business competitiveness.``

Unemployed college graduates desire for the high quality IT technology. This is because even graduates of the humanities can be employed if they have the skill. Highly educated 360 people such as a graduate of the Seoul National University Graduate School, a person with the TOIEC score of 930, applied for the Korea Manpower Agency (KMA)’s 6-month JAVA programmer education program, which admitted 60 under the slogan of `elite program` in February. Ko Jae-Yong, a director of the Ability Development Department of the KMA said that ``the leading IT companies try to hire them even before they graduate. We plan to increase the numbers of students to 90 and to evaluate which education program is desperately in need.``

- Unreliable educational environment: An IT related official said that ``high quality IT human resources should be produced in college.`` However, experts pointed out that this kind of thought originates in neglect of the characteristics of IT industry. Kim Tae-Ho of the Korea Sun Micro Education Center said that `` Professors cannot master the all practical operations since JAVA, which is a program in high demand, was produced only three years ago. It is impossible for colleges to teach new technologies which change from year to year.`` Since people often cannot learn any practical technologies in the private-run education centers since the curriculum is `mixed`, 6-month `Web Consultant` program of `H` private education center, designated by the Minister of Labor as a job- training center in Seoul, allots only 5-10 days to JAVA, Lynox, and Network. This means that the teaching is superficial. Although the high quality lectures offered by the program developing companies are better, tuition is 2-4 million won per month. Jun In-Ok, research director of the Bit Computer, said that ``most education centers cling to the profit-making businesses backed by the government support. Another reason for the unreliable IT education is that it is difficult to find professional lecturers in this field because they are highly demanded by the venture companies.``

- Let’s prefer `quality` than `quantity`: 210,000 human resources were trained through the job-training for the unemployed last year. However, the rate of employment reached only 37 percent (53000). An official of the Ministry of Labor said, ``IT human resources training has inclined to a quantity-centered education since it was promoted as a countermeasure for the unemployment. The goal of this year is to train the half of 60,000 as core human resources like programmer, and to gradually change the training program to `elite` program.`` Ministry of Labor has decide to increase the number of core human resources while reducing the total number of trainees. Professor Jang said that ``one’s social standing is to be at risk if the person stays away from his or her original job for a while because of lectureship in the IT field. The government should secure the social standing of the lectures and allow them to deliver new technologies back and forth between the original job and educational setting by forming the pool of the professional lectures.

Kim Joon-Seok kjs359@donga.com