00:05Before you decide where to start your career in Korea, here's what employers are actually
00:11building right now.
00:12LG just detailed an AI education pipeline that trains over 33,000 teenagers a year for
00:20free, feeding into a 5,000-person young adult program and Korea's first accredited corporate
00:26AI graduate school.
00:27Long-term youth unemployment in Korea rose 13.5% in two years, even as AI-related hiring
00:35accelerates.
00:36Hyundai's humanoid robot Atlas is going to an outside client for the first time next
00:42year.
00:42Waymo just set up a Korean entity, and Kakao released a new open-source AI model built for
00:48on-device use.
00:51It's Wednesday, July 29th.
00:53Let's look at what this means for job seekers and graduates in Korea.
00:57Korea's youth labor market is splitting.
01:00Overall, resting youth numbers eased slightly, but the share who have been jobless for over
01:05a year kept climbing.
01:07At the same time, large corporations are investing heavily in AI talent pipelines that stretch
01:13from high school programs to graduate degrees.
01:15global tech and robotics players are also expanding into Korea, adding new categories of jobs around
01:22autonomous driving, humanoid robotics, and on-device AI.
01:27Here's what the numbers show.
01:29LG runs AI education centers in Seoul and Pusan that train more than 33,000 teenagers a year,
01:36all free of charge.
01:38LG's youth program, LG Amers, brings in more than 5,000 participants annually for graduate-level
01:45AI coursework and hackathons using real company data.
01:49LG opened Korea's first education ministry-accredited in-house AI graduate school this March, extending
01:56the pipeline from students to working researchers.
02:01Long-term unemployed youth reached 427,143 this year, up 13.5% from 2024, now 62.4% of
02:13all resting
02:14young Koreans.
02:15Hyundai's robotics unit, Boston Dynamics, will deliver its humanoid robot, Atlas, to
02:21an outside client for pilot testing next year, its first delivery beyond Hyundai itself.
02:27Waymo completed its Korean incorporation on July 24, though industry estimates suggest
02:33robo-taxi service is still at least six months away under current regulations.
02:38So what does this mean for job seekers and graduates weighing Korea right now?
02:43Earlier, we said long-term youth joblessness is still climbing.
02:47Here's what that actually means for you.
02:49The longer a gap sits on your resume, the more it works against you, so structured entry
02:54points matter more than waiting for the perfect opening.
02:58LG's layered pipeline, from teen education to a corporate graduate school, signals that
03:03AI fluency, not just a degree, is becoming the real filter for entry-level hiring at major
03:09Korean firms. Watch which companies follow Hyundai, Waymo, and Kakao into robotics and on-device AI,
03:16because that is where new job categories are opening up first.
03:22That's today's AI Prism, students and grads.
03:26This episode was produced with AI Assistants based on Seoul Economic Daily reporting,
03:31and reviewed by a human editor.
03:33AI Prism is a Juan Ifra award-winning series. We'll be back tomorrow.
03:37You've been listening to AI Prism from Seoul Economic Daily.
