Labor ministry honors regional workforce councils at Seoul forum

The labor ministry said Friday it brought together all 17 regional human resources development councils to share results from the past year's regional workforce training programs, honoring the best-performing councils at a Seoul event.

About 150 people attended the 2026 Regional Human Resources Development Council Day at Hotel Eliena in Gangnam District, Seoul, including officials from the Ministry of Employment and Labor, the Human Resources Development Service of Korea and the councils. The event was organized to share outstanding operating practices and benchmark them across regions.

Gyeongnam regional council took the top ministerial award in the annual performance evaluation, with Gangwon, North Chungcheong, Incheon and Daejeon receiving excellence awards.

In the innovation case competition, Gyeongnam again won the grand prize for developing 37 competency units under a regional job skills standard that supplements the national competency framework, responding to training demand created by the spread of generative artificial intelligence in local industry. South Chungcheong and North Chungcheong took the top excellence awards, while Sejong and Busan received excellence awards.

South Chungcheong council built a job-transfer map by analyzing similarities across seven occupations and nine industries, a response to the crisis in the petrochemical complex at Daesan in Seosan, and plans to link it to employment counseling at job welfare centers. It also plans to spread the labor transition governance model to other crisis industries in the province including steelmaking in Dangjin.

North Chungcheong council said it analyzed job-seeking trends and surveyed parents' perceptions of small and mid-sized companies in response to young people leaving the region and declining preference for such employers, working with the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and the provincial education office on visits to promising small firms and tailored local industry training. It reported that the youth employment rate in the province reached 73.5 percent, the highest in the country, while the employment rate for students at vocational high schools rose to 53.2 percent from 50.2 percent. It ran company visits attended by 298 people and expanded semiconductor and biotechnology training courses.

At the event, the Human Resources Development Service of Korea shared guidelines for the councils' 2027 business plans, reflecting a system changed under the mid- to long-term basic plan for workforce development, and outlined directions for future work including stronger in-depth regional surveys led by the councils.