Job Competence of College Students in Korea: An Expansion of Core Competence Theory

The purpose of this study is to find what competence determines the employment of college students using data from the K-CESA (Korea Collegiate Essential Skills Assessment) of a Korean university during 2009-2014. This test comprises of 6 categories of competence: self-management, global readiness, interpersonal relationship, resource/information/technology handling, communication and comprehensive reasoning. In addition to these competences, we add the comprehensive variable, grade point average. In order to identify the qualities of employment, employment was classified into 3 types: all employment, employment in decent jobs and employment in the top 500 companies. Results are as follows: For all employment and decent jobs, GPA and comprehensive reasoning were the meaningful variables. However in case of the top 500 companies, interpersonal relationship was added. Based on the analysis, this study suggests the fundamental concepts of college students’ job competence: job specific competence, job basic competence, and basic competence.