The Characteristics and Perspectives of Industrial Technology Labor-force by Technology Intensities in Korean Manufacturing

기술집약도별 산업기술인력 수급구조의 특징과 정책적 시사점

This paper studies the supply and demand of Industrial Technology Labor-force(ITL) and analyzes the determinate of ITL shortage in Korean manufacturing. We classified the industry into four categories-high technology industries, medium-high technology industries, medium-low technology industries and low technology industries-based on its R&D intensity like OECD. For the empirical analyses we use a survey data collected from 5,703 enterprises. The key findings are as follows: Firstly, a large majority of ITL is engaged in more technology-intensive industries but the categories that are exposed to more serious labor-force shortage problem are medium-high technology industries and low technology industries. Secondly, in the terms of supply factor, the ITL shortage problems are mainly due to the avoidance of ITL jobs. And the demand point, the reason is that the most of ITL are not researchers but production managers. Thirdly, the cause of imbalance between supply and demand of ITL are different by the technological categories. For example, in the high technology industries, the supply factors, such as average wage and turnover rate played more important role in the imbalance. But in the low technology industries the demand factors, such as per capita sales and the ratio of ITL in all employees were relatively much more important. Based on the findings, we discovered some political meanings such as the necessity to plan various policies to resolve the shortage problem of ITL according to the technological categories, etc.