South Korea is rapidly entering an aging society, facing a serious national crisis stemming from a lack of workforce and faltering economic growth. Consequently, promoting the continuous participation of middle-aged adults in economic activities is an...
South Korea is rapidly entering an aging society, facing a serious national crisis stemming from a lack of workforce and faltering economic growth. Consequently, promoting the continuous participation of middle-aged adults in economic activities is an essential task to maintain the country's competitiveness. However, old employment policies and previous studies have focused mainly on the results of reemployment, providing a relatively poor analysis of job-seeking intentions or activities at the stage preceding reentry into the labor market. An important basis for designing effective employment politices results from analyzing how the subjective competencies and attitudes perceived by middle-aged workers and the institutional environment surrounding them are converted into employment seeking intentions and activites. To this end, this study empirically analyzes factors that influence the intentions and activity experiences of middle-aged workers seeking employment.
For the analysis, the study utilized raw data from 8,085 respondents, after excluding missing values, through the 2025 Job Demand Survey of Seoul for Middle-Aged Workers, comprising of 6,255 employed workers and 1,830 unemployed workers, from 10,006 middle-aged workers who lived in Seoul and were aged 40-64. By utilizing the latest survey data from 2025 in large amounts, the researcher could supplement the time difference issue with the old panel data and reflect the recent labor market environment in the analysis. The independent variables were divided into the following factors: demographic and social, economic and living conditions, psychological and technological, and policy. The researcher reviewed each factor in effect direction and size, using a logit model as the basic framework. Ordinal and binary logit analyses were conducted for employment seeking intentions and activity experiences, respectively, according to the characteristics of the dependent variables. The subjects were divided into employed and unemployed workers to examine differences in employment seeking decision structure between groups.
The analysis results show that gender, a demographic and social factor, was a significant variable for both employment seeking intentions and activity experiences. Women had lower intentions for reentering the labor market than men. This verifies that women still suffer from structural and environmental restrictions due to childbirth, motherhood, and career interruption. Of the economic and living condition factors, income had minute effects only on the employment seeking intentions of employed workers. Health status was not a significant factor in employed nor unemployed workers. Income and health status were not significant for employment seeking activity experiences. These results suggest that the employment seeking activities of middle-aged workers were dependent on subjective perceptions more than on objective conditions. Under the psychological and technological factors, self-efficacy and AI utilization abilities as part of subjective perceptions were core factors that strongly facilitated employment seeking intentions and activities of both employed and unemployed workers. Finally, experiences with Seoul's projects for the middle-aged, a policy factor, had the highest impact on both job-seeking intentions and activities. However, this should not be considered the net effect of the policy. It is necessary to interpret this result carefully, considering the self-selection bias of workers with high employment seeking determination.
In short, these findings raise the need for a policy approach to strengthen the self-confidence of middle-aged workers and increase their technological adaptability by considering their individual psychological and technological factors beyond simple job offers so that their reentry into the labor market can be facilitated.
Based on these findings, the study offers policy implications for the middle-aged and provides primary materials for contributing to future studies and policies, facilitating their practical participation in the labor market and creating a sustainable employment environment.