Highly Educated, High-Paid Jobs Most Exposed to AI Are Becoming Harder for Young People to Enter

Jobs most exposed to generative artificial intelligence in South Korea tend to be held by more highly educated and better-paid workers, but younger people are finding it harder to enter those occupations.

A report in the summer issue of the Korea Employment Information Service’s Employment Issue analyzed domestic labor-market data alongside observed exposure data based on actual use of Anthropic’s Claude. Researchers classified occupations in the top 25% of AI exposure as highly exposed and occupations with zero exposure as unexposed.

In the second half of last year, 25.4% of employed people worked in highly exposed jobs, while 31.1% worked in jobs with no generative-AI exposure. The share in highly exposed work reached 35.7% among four-year university graduates and 34.1% among people with graduate degrees. It stood at 26% for junior-college graduates and 20.3% for high-school graduates.

The pay gap was also pronounced. Workers in highly exposed occupations earned an average monthly wage of 3.658 million won, compared with 2.706 million won among workers in unexposed jobs, a difference of about 35%. Some 21.3% of the highly exposed group earned at least 5 million won per month, more than twice the 9.7% share in the unexposed group.

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The decline in employment in highly exposed occupations among young people had already continued before ChatGPT was released, and the analysis period was short, so it is difficult to interpret this decline as being caused solely by generative AI.

Women accounted for 30.4% of the highly exposed group, compared with 21.4% for men. Researchers attributed the difference to women’s relatively strong presence in office roles such as product planning, customer consulting, translation and interpretation.

The study did not find clear evidence that generative AI had already displaced jobs overall. Employment in highly exposed occupations rose from 7.085 million people in 2021 to 7.377 million last year. Among workers under 30, however, employment in highly exposed jobs fell from 1.197 million in 2022 to 1.037 million last year. Employment in unexposed jobs declined from 915,000 to 846,000 over the same period.

Researchers cautioned that the decline in young workers’ highly exposed occupations had begun before ChatGPT launched in November 2022, and that the period studied was short. They warned that a continued slowdown in young people entering such jobs could hurt career development and the accumulation of skills.

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If the trend of young people entering highly exposed occupations continues to slow, it could negatively affect career formation and the accumulation of skills.