Koreans Shun Overseas Postings Amid Pandemic

Well-paid out overseas postings, long the dream of many Korean workers, possess quickly lost their luster as a result of coronavirus pandemic.

The Korea Federation of Small and Medium Business recently polled 300 exporters, and 84 percent of respondents said they have problems with their overseas operations, 38 percent of these because they have trouble relocating staff abroad.

One staffer in a major IT company in Paju, Gyeonggi Province, was delivered to Chongqing, China for four months this past year, and the knowledge turned into a good nightmare. He was confined to his hotel room and office for three months and had to get into quarantine for another month when he came up home.

"In the past, people used to fight to receive posted overseas, however now such assignments happen to be shunned," he said. "People nowadays don't even desire to be delivered to the U.S. or Europe."

Fears of COVID-19 or lockdown conditions are the main reasons. Many countries except Taiwan and Israel remain considered more dangerous than Korea because infection numbers will be so higher. A spate of Korean personnel at construction sites in Poland, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the UAE possess analyzed positive, and Korean staff on an engineering project in Iraq needed to be airlifted out when they caught the virus.

One team leader with a huge builder said, "You will find a greater concern with being struggling to get medicine than being infected with the virus. Our personnel abroad will be begging us to permit them get back, and nobody here really wants to get abroad, so we're having some problems."

Many countries put visitors into two weeks' quarantine, and on go back to Korea they have to go through it almost all again. Most are also afraid of hate crimes against Asians that contain been recently highlighted in the U.S., stoked by the fact that Asians somehow designed COVID-19.

In addition, millennials seem generally less interested in overseas postings than previous generations because they tend to be more timid, lethargic and inward-looking.

Many workers throw in the towel. One man who landed employment as a software developer with a financial company in Chicago said, "Because I had to home based, I spent many days without speaking with anyone. I asked myself how that was any not the same as functioning online in Korea, so I made a decision to come back after just one year."

Most businesses today handle their overseas communication through video conferencing and produce decisions remotely, which is likely to reduce the have to send staff abroad.