S. Korean Startups, Facing A Serious Shortage Of Manpower, Are Looking To India

In an effort to connect local university students, the Ministry of SMEs and Startups (MSS) hosted a “Venture Startup Talent Matching Festival” in New Delhi, India, at the end of February. The job fair links startups and small and medium-sized businesses in the United States with developers and engineering expertise from Indian institutions. This year’s event was the first of its kind to be organized in India; the job fair of the same name is held annually in South Korea. More than one thousand Indian university students attended the event, which featured 120 local startups as participants.

Due to elite talent’s strong preference for medical institutions and distaste for science and engineering, domestic information technology (IT) firms are facing a serious talent shortage. As a result, they are looking as far away as India, Vietnam, and Eastern Europe for developers. Concerns over the lack of skill have been raised by a number of data sources. There is a shortfall of over 21,300 software workers in South Korea, according to a poll on IT companies done last year by the Software Policy & Research Institute. In the four main new technology industries in the nation—artificial intelligence, cloud, big data, and nano—a shortfall of 59,600 workers is expected over the course of the next five years, beginning in 2023, according to a report released earlier this month by the Korea International Trade Association (KITA). In particular, there is expected to be a 30,000 person shortfall in the cloud and AI industries.

A manpower scarcity and rising labor expenses have been plaguing domestic companies as software developer salaries have surged during the coronavirus outbreak. The brightest engineers are looking for possibilities abroad, like in Silicon Valley, and would rather work for IT behemoths like Naver and Kakao. Thus, new enterprises account for around 88% of the software skills deficit.

The startup scene emphasizes that there is a talent shortage in the IT business as a whole, not just among engineers, and that things will only get worse. “In order to increase the number of majors in future new business areas and create an education system that can produce high-quality personnel, we should abolish the department quota regulation by university,” an official from an AI startup proposed.