HIRING AND TRAINING IN KOREAN ESTABLISHMENTS: DO EMPLOYERS SUBSTITUTE MAKING FOR BUYING?

Abstract

This study examines how employers’ various hiring behaviors affect the formal training in Korean establishments for newly employed college graduates. I use data from the 2000 “Employer Survey on College to Work,” collected by the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education and Training (KRIVET). The results suggest some important implications about employers’ decisions to “buy and/or make.” On the one hand, the relationships between hiring and training are far from simple. There is a substitution of skills in hiring for training after hiring, but worker training tends to be provided more by those employers who concentrate highly on employee searches. In particular, the content of additional training programs reinforces the screening criteria. On the other hand, the results suggest the persistence of conventional organizational practices in hiring and training. Training provided by employers may be somewhere in the middle of economic rationality and simple conventionality, i.e. less-than-rational behaviors.

Citation

Chang, W. (2003), "HIRING AND TRAINING IN KOREAN ESTABLISHMENTS: DO EMPLOYERS SUBSTITUTE MAKING FOR BUYING?", Bills, D.B. (Ed.) The Sociology of Job Training (Research in the Sociology of Work, Vol. 12), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 31-48. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0277-2833(03)12002-X