A new study from the National Assembly Futures Institute finds that the share of young South Koreans starting their careers in nonregular jobs has nearly tripled over the past four decades, and that the kind of job someone lands first shapes years of their working life afterward.
The institute analyzed the first jobs of 14,241 people born between 1962 and 1998, splitting them into four birth cohorts roughly a decade apart. Among those born from 1962 to 1968, just 12.7 percent started their careers in nonregular positions. That share rose to 17.4 percent for the 1969-1978 cohort, then jumped to 28.7 percent for those born from 1979 to 1988, and reached 33.5 percent among the youngest group, born between 1989 and 1998, roughly double the rate of the cohort born just one generation earlier.
Shorter Tenures, Faster Turnover
The nature of a first job has also changed. Average tenure in a first position fell from 70 months for the oldest cohort in the study to just 45.6 months for the youngest, meaning today's workers are leaving their first jobs, whether by choice or otherwise, in roughly two thirds of the time their parents' generation did.
A Widening Gap in Outcomes
The starting point matters more than it might seem. Among the youngest cohort, workers who began their careers in regular employment spent an average of about 8 years and 3 months in regular jobs over the following decade. Workers from the same generation who started in nonregular positions spent only about 3 years and 1 month in regular employment over that same ten-year window, a gap of more than five years built almost entirely on how their careers began.
The Climb Out of Nonregular Work
Most nonregular starters eventually make the jump to regular employment, but it takes time and it does not happen for everyone. Across the full study, 71.2 percent of workers who started in nonregular jobs transitioned to regular employment within ten years, taking an average of four years and ten months to do so. The remaining 28.8 percent never made that transition at all within the decade studied. Nonregular starters also spent far more time unemployed along the way, averaging 35.6 months without work compared to 10.8 months for those who started in regular jobs.
Stability Has Eroded Across the Board
Even the workers who landed regular jobs from the start are holding onto them less consistently than earlier generations did. Among the 1962-1968 cohort, 56.5 percent stayed in a single regular position for the full ten years studied. Among the 1989-1998 cohort, only 21.9 percent did the same, a decline that suggests the labor market has grown less stable overall, not just for those who start out in nonregular work.