South Korea’s Ministry of Personnel Management recorded that 57.5% of voluntary resignations from the central government came from employees with fewer than five years of service, and the number of 21-30-year-old civil servants who resigned voluntarily doubled from 2,441 in 2015 to 5,105 in 2024. A Grade 9 entry-level civil servant earns approximately 1.77 million won per month (roughly $1,300 USD), a figure that has fallen materially behind compensation at large private technology and financial firms over the same decade. The Korea Herald reported that only 21% of young Koreans now want to remain at a single organisation until retirement, down from approximately 35% a decade prior, and that civil service exam applicant-to-seat ratios collapsed from 979:1 in 2006 to 22.8:1 in 2025 — the seventh consecutive year of decline.
On the inaction side, Gallup Korea’s 2022 employment survey found that approximately 22% of private sector workers identified job insecurity as a significant source of career regret. OECD data records that roughly 37% of South Korean private sector workers hold non-regular (bijeonggyujik) contracts, a structural condition that drives regret among those who forfeited the lifetime-security premium of government employment. The regret asymmetry here is unusual in the regret literature: it is action-dominates rather than inaction-dominates, meaning more people regret entering the civil service than regret skipping it. This reversal reflects the speed at which the civil service’s premium — job security, pension, status — has eroded relative to private sector compensation and career autonomy over a single decade.
Both regret rates carry significant measurement caveats. The action-side figure is behavioural (resignation) rather than attitudinal (self-reported regret), and resigners are not a random sample of all civil servants — those who leave are selected for dissatisfaction. The inaction-side 22% is a proxy from job-insecurity data rather than a direct question about forgoing the civil service. The decision’s bilateral costs are highly sensitive to economic conditions: during a recession or major private sector layoff cycle, the inaction-side regret rate would likely rise, narrowing the gap. The demographic context also matters: with South Korea’s fertility rate at 0.72 in 2023 (the lowest of any OECD country), the pool of young workers entering either track is shrinking, and the composition of each group is changing faster than survey cycles can capture.