Last updated on August 16, 2024
Over the past several years, the number of foreign professionals working in Korean organizations has increased dramatically.
Large companies are hiring more foreigners, particularly engineers, than ever before and universities have begun hiring foreign professors for tenure-track positions in large numbers. Rumor has it that about 20 percent of professors hired for tenure-track positions in recent years are foreigners. Even smaller companies and governmental organizations have begun to hire foreigners for the first time.
The increase in the number of foreign professionals has suddenly turned many organizations into multicultural workplaces, raising questions about how to create a new institutional culture that reflects the multicultural reality.
To understand the challenges, it is important to think about why and how foreign professionals are hired. Organizations typically make hiring decisions based on a combination of immediate and longer-term needs, but such needs vary widely. Immediate needs often include filling a gap in skills of the current staff. Longer-term needs are broader and include such things are improving brand image or developing a response to projected changes in the economy and society. The decision to hire a foreign professional, then, starts with the perception of the need to do so and that hiring a foreigner is more advantageous than hiring a Korean.
Korean society is subject to trends, as are many other societies. Hiring foreign professionals is one such trend. Somewhere in the post-IMF milieu of the 2000s, hiring foreign professionals became a symbol of being an advanced “global” organization. Korean-only became a sign of being backward and behind the times. Like many things in Korean society, the idea took root and spread fast, causing organizations to move quickly to hire their quota of foreign professionals, often without adequate preparation.
Most other advanced countries hire foreign professionals, most to a greater degree than Korea. Silicon Valley in the U.S., for example, is full of foreign professionals, many of whom are graduates of U.S. universities. The same holds true for many European countries. Though the percentage of foreigners in the workplace remains small, Japan is seeing an increase in the number of foreign engineers and scientists who choose to stay there after completing advanced studies at a Japanese university.
Compared to other nations attracting foreign professionals, Korea has a lower percentage of foreigners who earn an advanced degree and then decide to make a career here. This means that most foreign professionals arrive with no living experience in Korea and no Korean language skills. These are huge differences with, say, the U.S. where foreign professionals with advanced degrees are often more literate than many of the native speakers of English they work with.
Living experience helps give foreign professionals a sense of how things work in Korea and how to interact effectively with Koreans. It gives people a feel for manners and ways of behaving in a Korean context. It also helps in adjusting to the basic parameters of life in Korea, such as food, housing, and the climate.
Language skills are extremely important because they help a foreign professional develop an interesting life as a confident adult. Reality is that English proficiency in Korea is still low outside the confines of highly educated “globalized” circles. The average university graduate with limited travel experience overseas can speak English, but only with considerable difficulty. Persons with less than a university education know a few greetings at best. Daily life in Korea naturally goes on in Korean, and foreign professionals need some degree of proficiency in the language to feel confident about living here.
A quick look a guidebook of universities in Japan shows that language education and intercultural understanding are often closely linked. There are entire departments devoted to the subject. That intercultural understanding is a legitimate academic subject that indicates Japanese people view it is something worthy of study, an issue to be investigated. This may help reinforce nationalistic notions of Japanese uniqueness, but it also raises awareness of cultural differences and the need to understand them.
By contrast, intercultural understanding is rarely discussed and rarely taught in Korea. The assumption is that things will work themselves out because people will understand and forgive each other when a misunderstanding occurs. When discussed, language and intercultural understanding are oddly framed as an English problem, implying that Koreans bear the burden of intercultural understanding by improving their English ability. Over time, this causes Koreans to ignore foreign professionals because involving them takes time and patience amid busy schedules.
Intercultural understanding is essential for multicultural workplaces to work well. To raise awareness of intercultural understanding, greater value needs to be placed on encouraging foreign professionals to learn Korean and to develop greater understanding of Korean ways of life and thought. For Koreans, greater value needs to be placed on involving foreign professionals in the life of the organization by soliciting their input and advice.
Finally, the history of multicultural workplaces in Korea is young, so success now will set an important precedent for the future.