Today is December 7th, and I have decided to upload this post about working in Korea. I will try to give some advice as well. :)
It has been a year since I started working in Korea. Before work, I was studying at Seoul National University. I graduated in February 2021. Yes, I found the job before I even graduated. That's why I am feeling lucky about it. In this post, I will talk about that process step by step. I hope it helps someone. But if it is too long, I will make two different posts about it.
1. What do I do for a living in Korea?
I work at a multinational company in Korea and I'm working as a Human Resources Associate. I'm responsible for Learning and Development(L&D) and specialize in that area but at the same time, I do work as an HR Generalist to make sure I have experience in different functions of HR.
I'm the only foreigner in the company and they all speak Korean with me. I prepare everything in Korean and since my job is related to L&D, I prepare online training materials, offline training, as well as HR Information System manuals. I also am responsible for leading the meetings that are designed for team leaders' individual development plans. And finally, I'm responsible for the evaluation of all training that our employees get. I generally help my team leader with other administrational work too.
2. What is my educational background?
Well, not gonna lie,
I'm doing the job I had dreamed of.
I got my bachelor's degree at Middle East Technical University in Turkey and my major was Computer Education and Instructional Technology. The curriculum was perfect, and we learned programming, education, and instructional technology. However, I wasn't sure what I wanted to do after graduating. It was because I loved both programming and instructional technology (preparing educational materials by using technology could be one of the million definitions of this term). I decided to get my master's in Korea because the scholarship covered almost everything, and I was interested in Korea at those times. Anyways, until I started my master's in Korea, I worked as a software developer in Turkey for a year. And then, I came to Korea to study Educational Technology. I decided working in Korea could be one way to start my career. That's why I started looking for jobs in my last year of the master's process.
3. Just like that... Did I find the perfect job?
No, not just like that. First of all, everyone around me, EVERYONE, told me that I couldn't get a job in the HR department cause it is all Korean. They told me it didn't matter if I could fluently speak it or not since there would be some limits anyways. People suggested I look for software developer jobs instead of HR. And that is what I did for almost 4-6 months in 2020.
But of course, I wasn't selected for an interview even. Firstly, you need to present a portfolio that includes your software experiences. The second is that there is an exam related to software. After I had worked in Turkey as a software developer, I didn't really focus on programming since..well duh... I was studying Educational Technology :D So I didn't have any portfolio. I wasn't really confident about my programming skills for the same reason. And the most important thing... I didn't want to be a software developer.
I wanted to work in HR as an L&D Specialist. That's why I stopped applying for software programming jobs and looked for HR-related jobs.
And this was around December 2020. I applied to some places. However, they didn't - probably - even read my resume because I'm a foreigner :) and I didn't apply to start-ups because I didn't want to work in start-ups( just my preference. not that start-ups are bad.). Then I came across our company's job ad. The position they were looking for felt like they were looking for me.
I will need to talk about the left part in a separate post. This is too long.
Let's go to the second part if you are done reading :)
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