English Language Skills Essential

Globalization has far reaching impact on the Korean workplace. For one, Korean overseas teams are required to have English language skills since English is the global business language for most Korean companies. This has led to college students focusing considerable time and effort to polish their conversation skills. I'm actually quite impressed by the English language skills of most Korean college students.


This article points out the rigid requirements for job applicants at Samsung, (but most of Korea's top firms have similar policies). The last two paragraph point out other rigid norms for hiring eligibility.

Han Gook Ilbo
Speaking fair English will be an essential requirement for jobseekers wanting to land a place at the Samsung Group which will be recruiting 4,500 university graduates up to December.

Samsung said yesterday that it will disqualify job applicants who do not pass an English interview regardless of their academic performance and TOEIC test scores. It is the first time for South Korea's largest employer to demand of job applicants a certain level of conversational English skill. Most applicants are engineering and science graduates.

We are adopting stricter standards in our English tests to raise our competence as a global business, the group said in a press release. Those who lack English skills will be disqualified during the interview.

The only exemption from the English interview will be for those who will work in the domestic sales department, it said. For written English, it requires applicants to have a TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) score of 620 or above.

Samsung hired some 4,000 university graduates in the first half of the year _ pushing new hires for the year to 8,500. The number of the annual recruits has been increasing over the past three years, from 8,000 in 2004 and 8,200 in 2005.

Among the affiliates, Samsung Electronics is the single largest employer, with 1,890 job openings for engineering and science majors and 330 for other disciplines.

Samsung SDS, a computer network solution company, is next with 500 job slots, most of them for computer engineers and programmers. Samsung SDI and Samsung Electrics also have 200 and 160 openings, respectively.

Applications have to be submitted by Sept. 11 via the Group's Web site. One cannot apply to more than one company, and only the senior classes and those who graduated this year are accepted. Non-degree holders can also apply for the jobs as the group has had an open-door system since 1995, but cases are rare.

In a survey last month by job research firm Incruit, about 21 percent of 3,000 university students picked Samsung Electronics as their most favored workplace. At the time, the respondents cited high salaries and pride as the reasons they favored the company.