Labor ministry pledges wider role for industry skills councils as fifth term nears

The labor ministry said Friday it will expand the role and authority of South Korea's industry skills councils, the sector-level bodies that translate changes on the factory floor into national job standards and qualifications, as they prepare for a new three-year term starting in 2027.

Speaking at an event in Seoul to mark Industry Skills Council Day, the ministry and the Human Resources Development Service of Korea presented awards to 12 exemplary programs and declared the fifth-term vision for the councils: a human-resources development platform that diagnoses industrial change and drives innovation at the workplace.

The event drew about 180 people, including representatives of the 21 councils. It reviewed the achievements of the fourth term, which runs from 2024 through 2026, and set out directions for the fifth term, covering 2027 to 2029.

The councils, known by the acronym ISC, were launched in 2015 and have grown into an industry-wide governance structure in which some 600 trade associations and companies now take part. They survey the workforce in their sectors, monitor how jobs are changing, and develop national competency standards that feed industry's voice into government policy.

"The fifth-term ISC must become a body that reads changes at the workplace first and changes both policy and the field," said Pyun Do-in, director-general of the ministry's vocational skills policy bureau. The government, he added, will widen the councils' role and authority so that their results are put to use on the ground.

The fifth term shifts the focus from showcase projects to routine practice. The ministry wants the approach of tracing a problem found at a worksite straight through to standards, qualifications and training to become the standard working method for every council, not just the best performers.

The awards point to the kinds of work the ministry wants replicated. The top prize in the innovation performance competition went to the design and cultural content council, recognized for publishing the results of its job-change monitoring as papers at international academic conferences and for building a system to feed those findings into policy. The new-business idea competition's top prize went to the electronics council, which proposed a pilot for industry-specific qualifications run by the councils themselves, responding to a gap between fast-moving convergence and new-industry technologies and the slower national technical qualification system, and to a proliferation of private certificates not readily accepted across companies in the same industry. Its proposed sequence runs from job analysis through qualification standard design, pilot testing and verification.

"The councils serve as governance in which industry associations, companies and worker groups link the voice of the workplace to policy and workforce training," said Noh Gil-jun, director of skills development at the Human Resources Development Service of Korea. The service, he said, will keep supporting the councils in connecting industry, jobs and training.