Demands for human resources had changed according to five year-economic development plans implemented in the 1960s and levels of industrial development. In order to meet the demand, the vocational education and training in Korea was established and various policies and institutions were carried out. An abundant workforce at a low price was the key driver for the development of export-oriented and labor-intensive industries in the 1960s.
Skilled workers were required in the 1970s to develop the heavy chemical industry apart from the light industry. Therefore more vocational high schools and vocational colleges were established.
During this period, more high school graduates got jobs than went to universities.
As the importance of vocational training increased, the Vocational Training Law was established on January 17, 1967. At that time, public vocational training facilities, equipment, and technologies were obtained with foreign aid and the central vocational training center founded in 1972 played a role in nurturing training teachers. In 1973, the National Technical Qualification Act was established to generally manage skill qualifications which were handled by individual government departments. The national technical qualification provided learners with incentives for technology education and vocational training and at the same time, played a role in the foundation of
guaranteeing the quality of human resources. The qualification system is categorized as follows: national technical qualification and national qualification under individual legislation. The private qualification is categorized into three; accredited private qualification, registered private qualification, and in-house qualification. The national technical qualification is largely divided into the qualification for skills & techniques and qualification for services. The qualification for skills & techniques has 5 levels of professional engineers, master craftsmen, engineers, industrial engineers, and craftsmen.
Human Resources Development Services of Korea was founded in 1982 in Korea to operate separated public vocational training facilities in a comprehensive way. The establishment of the women's vocational training center and the Ilsan vocational training center for the disabled, expanded the scope of vocational training by providing opportunities of vocational training to the socially disadvantaged class.
In the 1990s, as the era of information oriented society and knowledge-based society emerged and the service industry grew dramatically, demand for high-quality human resources increased.
Prior to the 1990s, the goal of educational reform was a quantitative increase of education but it changed to the quality improvement of education after the 1990s. Junior colleges and universities made efforts to improve educational quality by reinforcing academy-industry cooperative education in order to produce human resources specialized in cutting-edge technologies.
Public vocational training facilities were transformed into
Polytechnic Colleges and private training facilities established joint vocational training centers that changed to Human Resources Development Institutes of the Korea Chamber of Commerce &
Industry.
From the late 1990s, the government implemented a financial funding program stressing cooperation between industries and vocational education institutes to advance the education and training system which cultivated human resources adapting to workplace and meeting industrial demands. It was encouraged to develop and operate curriculum reflecting demands and characteristics of regional industries. Based on mutual cooperation among local governments, regional education offices, and local industries, the vocational education pushed for changes centering on industries and learners.
In addition, career education was underlined for students to create awareness, explore, and prepare for their career within school education. Especially, after the financial crisis in 1997, a shortage of technical manpower and unemployment of the highly educated youth came to the forefront. The stress was put on the role of education to foster creative talent who were flexible in the rapidly changing labor market and had competitiveness.
The Framework Act on Qualifications was established in 1996 to determine basic matters of the qualification system: to categorize qualifications into national qualifications and private qualifications and to diversify managing entities of the system in order to meet demand for various qualifications according to the development of industrial society. That was an effort by the
government to promote people's vocational competency by managing and operating the qualification system in a systematic and efficient way and improving public confidence of the system.
The three vocational education laws of the Vocational Education and Training Promotion Act, the Framework Act on Qualifications and the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training Act were enacted and promulgated in March 1997. Based on the laws, the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training was founded as a government-funded research institute to support the development of Koreans' vocational competence.
The government established the Employment Insurance System in 1995 and raised vocational training funds for companies. The financial crisis started in 1997 created large-scale unemployment.
As the meaning of jobs changed from a lifelong workplace into lifelong working, a growing number of people achieved national technique qualifications. The Employment Insurance System contributed to the re-employment of jobless people by providing grand-scale vocational training.
After the 1990s, the government placed more attention on the skills development for the socially disadvantaged class and lifelong learning led by private or individual organizations began to receive attention. In line with the situation, the "training for the individual employed" program was launched to provide training expenses directly to irregular workers and workers in SMEs who had a negative view of vocational training opportunities. The 'Tomorrow Learning Card System' training introduced to train the unemployed
in 2011 was the most innovative and customized training system under which the jobless chose proper training courses for themselves with the assistance of consultants, instead of depending on conventional consigned-training institutes.
Meanwhile, the 2nd Qualification Management Operation Basic ․ Plan (2012~2016) was established based on the Framework Act on Qualifications to lay the foundation of linking work, education and training, and qualifications via the National Competency Standards (NCS). With NCS, the government systematically categorized knowledge, technologies, literacy and other criteria required to execute duties by industries and levels. NCS is used in various areas such as school education, job training, qualifications, corporate and personal competence development, etc. The Park Geun-hye administration set a goal to realize a competence-based society, not an educational background-focused one and proposed an administration task to systemize NCS. By doing so, the government gives an impetus to the establishment of an education and training system to meet industrial demands.
In 2009, the school curriculum was revised to include career education in a clear and comprehensive way. According to levels of schooling, the importance of career education's role and lifelong learning were strongly emphasized with the key contents to understanding, exploring, and pioneering careers. To conduct career education, reformative actions were taken to newly prepare
"creative experiential activities" and designate the subject of
"career and occupation" as a selective subject.
The Ministry of Education provided measures to promote career
education in 2013: to offer personally customized career consultations, to operate talent·aptitude-oriented curriculum, to have more career-experience activities, to give training to improve ability for career education, to expand participation of parents in career education, to vitalize the career education support system, and to study and analyze the status of career education. Especially 'Free Learning Semester' is one of the government policy tasks. The goal is to give career education which encourages students to find their aptitude and befitting career and to develop vocational competence in their chosen career.
Recently the government promoted a policy to reinforce career education to deal with youth unemployment in a highly educated society and insufficient vocational education in high schools. As part of efforts to transform the educational background-focused society into an ability-oriented society, the government has made intensive investment in policies for specialized vocational high schools and meister high schools since 2008. Specialized vocational high schools value students' talents and aptitudes designed to nurture talented human resources in specific areas or to provide experience-oriented education such as field training.
Meister high schools are a small number of selected schools among specialized vocational high schools focusing on vocational education.
The purpose of meister high schools is to run a curriculum that is customized to industrial demands based on agreements with specific industries and to foster core, skilled human resources that are demanded by the labor market. Meister high schools aim to
nurture an outstanding industrial workforce meeting the demands of special industries. Students of specialized vocational high schools can choose between getting a job and going on to university after graduation, but students of meister high schools have no choice but to find work.
The policy is to establish a vocational education model which increases the quantity and quality of employment of high school graduates with the full support of the country within the basic framework of industry-academia cooperation and the advancement of high school career education. By focusing on "Employment First, College Later", meister high schools were designed to deal with the imbalance of demand and supply of the workforce and to provide more job opportunities for high school graduates.