Labor ministry highlights five small-business training-consulting cases

The labor ministry said Thursday that the Korea Human Resources Development Service selected five teams as outstanding cases in its skills-development doctor program at a competition in Seoul.

The program, which the service has operated since 2023, assigns consultants to assess participating small and medium-sized businesses' workplace needs and recommend tailored training. This year, 330 consultants had provided tailored training consulting to more than 12,000 companies through July.

Small businesses and the service participated in the competition as teams, with the five cases chosen through document and presentation reviews.

"We hope that more small and medium-sized businesses will work with skills-development doctors through the various outstanding cases in this competition," Lee Byung-hun, chairman of the service, said.

Taehwa Gieop, one of the selected businesses, faced an urgent need to improve processes as its production environment changed rapidly. The service's Gyeongnam branch worked with company executives and staff to identify step-by-step production-floor problems and connect them with vocational skills-development programs. Taehwa raised per-employee production to 50 from 35.9 through shop-floor improvement training and set a mid- to long-term AI training road map.

Another selected company, Proval, had struggled to increase productivity despite its smart-factory and research-and-development investments and faced difficulty recruiting staff. It developed internal talent through the program, established an automation system it could operate itself and introduced a 4.5-day workweek.