Seoul, 16 August 2026 – More than half of South Korea’s youth employment decline in July was concentrated in knowledge-intensive industries with high exposure to artificial intelligence, signalling that automation pressure is moving beyond factories and face-to-face services into entry-level white-collar work.
Employment among people aged 15 to 29 fell by more than 191,000 from a year earlier. The information and communications sector, covering computer programming, telecommunications and digital-media publishing, lost 74,517 positions—the steepest monthly decline since comparable records began in 2014. Professional, scientific and technical services shed a further 23,640 jobs.
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