This article is by Lim Jeong-won and read by an artificial voice.



Just last week, seven of Korea's biggest conglomerates announced that they plan on hiring around 40,000 new workers this year. College students and prospective job seekers should be celebrating. But are they?

It is notoriously difficult to get a job as a young college grad these days. One thing that stands out in the Korean job market, however, is the "spec war": students and job seekers building up "specs" - short for "specifications" - or qualifications in the form of language tests, internships, licenses and other means to fill out their resumes.

A case of the spec war getting completely out of hand shook the country back in 2019 when then-Justice Minister Cho Kuk's daughter was found to have falsified documents related to her medical school applications and been granted special treatment in the process of getting internships and letters of recommendation.

Cho's daughter was ultimately pulled from medical school, and her university degrees and entrance to medical school were revoked. When searched in Korean online, Cho's daughter's case is almost always tied to the word "specs," with the whole fiasco dubbed as a "false specs controversy."

So what is the whole deal with specs and the spec war? Where did it start, how much time and money do people spend on building specs and is that at all productive in the end?



"It feels like a war": the realities of specs

Is the competition to build up your resume so harsh as to call it a "war"? The answer, according to young job seekers, is a definite "yes."

"I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that it feels like a war," said Choi Jin-young, a 25-year-old student who has deferred graduation for a semester to concentrate on building up specs to apply to big conglomerates. "To get even an internship is so competitive, knowing that an internship is not an end but a means."

"I spend I guess about a third of my time building my specs," said another university student surnamed Lee. "That includes studying for language tests like TOEIC and second language-related qualifications, writing personal statements to get an internship and everything. It does take up a lot of my time."

The amount of money spent on building specs is also striking, with job seekers spending on average 440,000 won ($314) monthly on efforts to get more specs, according to surveys done in 2024 by Statistics Korea and Job Korea.



Nearly half, or 42.9 percent, of all university graduates looking for a job signed up for or are receiving private tutoring, or they are going to hagwons for specs, according to a September survey by Job Korea. Of those surveyed, 71.1 percent said that they feel financially burdened by the process of building specs to secure a job.

Some students even get part-time jobs so that they can pay for their spec-building activities - a strange cycle of "lesser" jobs paying the way for "better" jobs.

Some young people are so tired from the spec war that they opt out of it completely, ending up as "NEETs" - which stands for not in education, employment or training - or economically inactive youth. The number of young NEETs peaked at 443,000 last year, the highest on record, according to Statistics Korea.



When and why the spec war started

The start of the spec war can be traced back to the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997, when Korea faced a severe national financial crisis and received a bailout package from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), according to experts.

"The problem of spec competition has been built up for a long time since the Asian Financial Crisis, when the stability of jobs and the number of jobs declined," said Ahn Tae-hyun, a professor of economics at Sogang University.

"The Asian Financial Crisis was a turning point," explained Shin Eun-jong, a professor of business administration at Dankook University. "Korea's old public recruitment model gave way to ad-hoc hiring focused on ready-made talent. Specs became the s...