Theme park’s novel bid to fix South Korea youth unemployment

SEOUL – At a children’s role-playing theme park in Seoul, 23-year-old Park Woo-joo is on a very adult mission – the university-educated but unemployed South Korean is searching for his future career.

Part of a Mexican-owned global chain, KidZania typically offers young children the chance to play at dozens of different jobs – from firefighter to dentist – in giant indoor centres, including one in Seoul that receives hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.

But KidZania South Korea has been pioneering a new use for its Seoul venue: helping unemployed young people find their real-life calling at nostalgia-laced, wildly popular, adults-only events.

Despite labour shortages linked to its super-low birth rate, youth unemployment in South Korea is stubbornly high – the result, experts say, of a mismatch between the highly educated youth and the realities of the country’s labour market.

Mr Park has a degree in business administration, but has not been able to find a job he wants. So, in June, he was one of 500 people who bought a ticket for the sold-out “Kids-ania” event for adults – the name is a pun in Korean, effectively meaning “Not Kids”.

At the sprawling indoor theme park, while people dressed as police officers and Supreme Court judges role-played in purpose-built areas, Mr Park was eager to “experience as much as possible”.

He is hoping that, by testing out a bunch of potential careers, he might have a “light bulb moment” and discover what he should be doing with his life.

“I think it’s a great way for people who are unemployed to have fun and learn at the same time,” he said.

Nostalgia tour

The adult events were the brainchild of Mr Kang Jae-hyung, president of KidZania South Korea, who wanted to help the young people who might have come to the park when it first opened in 2010.

“The kids who were seven years old when they first came here are now 21,” Mr Kang said.

His colleagues were sceptical about the idea and he initially faced internal opposition, he said, but tickets for the first event sold out immediately.

Mr Kang said that many young South Korean adults needed to tap their innate sense of fun, and not take working life too seriously.

“I just want them to remember what they wanted to do when they were young,” said Mr Kang, adding that it was important “not to crush children’s dreams”.

Ms Lee Soo-min, 20, has memories of going to KidZania and said the place seemed the same when she returned more than a decade later.

“But it seems I’ve changed,” she said.

Standing in line at a radio studio to try her hand at being a DJ, Ms Lee, a university student trying to figure out what to do with her life, added: “Now, I begin to take these experiences seriously.”

Aspirations v reality

The population of South Korea, which has the world’s lowest birth rate, has long been shrinking.

The country’s working-age population will begin falling off from 2028, official projections show, and many sectors of the economy – from agriculture to restaurants to care homes – already suffer from widespread labour shortages, with immigration tightly limited.

Even so, the country has persistently high youth unemployment, currently at 6.2 per cent, more than double the overall rate of 2.9 per cent, official figures show.

The number of young people classified as “resting” – neither employed nor actively seeking work – hit 426,000 in June, the second-highest rate since records began in 2003. The highest was during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The problem, experts say, is that young South Koreans would rather not work than work in a job perceived as unpopular or beneath them.

For example, nearly half of young South Koreans are reluctant to join small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), official figures show – even though such businesses make up some 98 per cent of the economy, with high-profile corporations such as Samsung just 2 per cent.

This mismatch between the aspirations of highly educated young people and the realities of the labour market “gradually deepens unemployment among highly educated youth”, said associate research fellow Hwang Gwang-hoon from the Korea Employment Information Service, who added that the country also needs to create more “quality jobs”, especially in SMEs.

For KidZania’s Mr Kang, unemployed young people need to let go of the fears and embarrassments that may be holding them back in the job market.

“Do what you want to do. Don’t be self-conscious,” he said. AFP