Why South Korean millennials are ditching white-collar jobs to chase their dreams online
- South Korea’s strict hierarchical corporate culture and oversupply of college graduates are taking their toll
- ‘Quitting jobs’ appeared on the nation’s top 10 new year resolution list on major social media sites
Yoon Chang-hyun’s parents told him to get his sanity checked when he quit his secure job as a researcher at Samsung Electronics in 2015 to start his own YouTube channel.
The 65 million won (US$57,619) a year salary – triple South Korea’s average entry level wage – plus top-notch health care and other benefits offered by the world’s biggest smartphone and memory chip maker was the envy of many college graduates.
But burned out and disillusioned by repeated night shifts, narrowing opportunities for promotion and skyrocketing property prices that have pushed home ownership out of reach, the then 32-year old Yoon gave it all up in favour of an uncertain career as an internet content provider.
Yoon is among a growing wave of South Korean millennials ditching stable white collar jobs, even as unemployment spikes and millions of others still fight to get into the powerful, family-controlled conglomerates known as chaebol.
Some young Koreans are also moving out of city for farming or taking blue collar jobs abroad, shunning their society’s traditional measures of success – well-paid office work, raising a family and buying a flat.
“I got asked a lot if I had gone crazy,” Yoon said. “But I’d quit again if I go back. My bosses didn’t look happy. They were overworked, lonely.”
