The Ministry of Science and ICT (Minister Lim Hye-sook) will begin full-scale support for job training for university students majoring in ICT this year and will work to cultivate practical ICT talent with outstanding practical skills.

The Ministry of Science and ICT will fully implement the 'Information and Communication Technology Credit-Linked Project Internship' project, which supports job-related project-based internships at small and medium-sized information and communication technology companies for 345 university students majoring in information and communication technology.

This project, which has been underway since 2015, aims to cultivate talent with practical skills that meet the needs of businesses and industrial sites in a rapidly changing information and communications technology industry environment. Students will be able to receive credit while simultaneously completing internships related to their majors at companies.

This year, as part of the "Youth Support Policy for the Digital Transformation Era," we expanded the scope of global corporate internship support to 20 students to enable them to experience and thrive in a broader world.

In the first half of the year internship recruitment notice held over the past two months (December 2021 - January 2022), 811 students applied for approximately 163 positions, demonstrating a high competition rate of approximately 5:1 and popularity. They went through a matching process with companies they hope to intern with in February and are currently conducting internships at domestic and international companies starting in March.

The government will support the trainees selected for the global course (9 trainees in the first half of the year) with round-trip airfare, visa issuance fees, and living expenses for local life (KRW 1.5 million per month), and the company will provide an internship allowance (more than USD 1,700 per month).

The companies conducting the global internship are four overseas companies located in Silicon Valley in the United States: Bear Robotics (robotics), Cypherom (medical), Enyuma (education), and Motion2AI (logistics). Students plan to improve their practical skills by carrying out projects such as data analysis and software testing related to corporate work, such as artificial intelligence robotics, edutech, and logistics automation, at the companies for the next six months (March to August).

Trainees selected for the domestic course (154 in the first half of the year) will complete an internship at 114 information and communication technology companies nationwide for approximately 4 months (March to June), and will receive an internship allowance of at least 1.9 million won per month (minimum wage).

This project, which has been underway since 2015 to cultivate practical talents with both theoretical and practical skills, has seen a total of 1,800 trainees participate in domestic and international internships (1,723 domestic, 77 global), and has significantly contributed to solving youth unemployment, with the average employment rate of graduates over the past three years reaching 88.1%.

Furthermore, both trainees and companies showed high satisfaction, with 34 of the 77 participants in the global program extending their internship periods at the request of local companies, and 12 of them finding employment at the companies (including domestic branches).

Song Sang-hoon, Director General of the Ministry of Science and ICT's Information and Communication Industry Policy Bureau, said, "It is important to improve the practical skills of our youth through internships and other means to meet the needs of the rapidly changing industrial field in the era of digital transformation."o; and said, “The Ministry of Science and ICT plans to expand talent development to meet corporate needs in the future, while also expanding global education and overseas internships so that our young people can grow on a wider stage.”