중소기업 기술인력 수급불균형의 결정요인에 관한 연구: 기술수준과 기업성장단계의 관점에서

Over the years, lack of technical workers has been pointed out as the reason for the indolence of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Korea. To solve this problem, the Korean government has introduced various support measures mitigate the problem. The government and some experts see that these measures had helped to lessen the hardships that SMEs experience. However, other experts see that those programs do not have significant impact on improving the condition, accordingly, will not have such impact on mitigating the workers shortage problem. Consequently, despite the many different government support policies in existence, the problem has not been resolved. Several surveys and researches have been conducted to address the problem, but only few studies attempted to identify the reason behind the problem. Especially considering the variety of Korean SMEs, which represent 99.9% of the businesses in the country and whose workers represent 87.5% of the country’s workforce, there is probably a set of heterogeneous factors for the workforce imbalance that many SMEs in Korea are experiencing today. In order to investigate this issue, the results of a recent survey that was carried out on about 500 SMEs were used to identify the determining factors that led to the lack of technical workforce of SMEs. In particular, we focused on the effects of the performance management system(PMS) and human resources management(HRM) system on the skill demands by the companies, and on its relevance to the workers shortage. In other words, the performance management system composed 4 types – Value, Growth, Profit, and Decline. These types were drawn from firm competitiveness compared to average industry. And the HRM system was divided to 3 types – Cost minimizing, Inducement, and Investment type. Also, this paper focused on the SMEs types, which are comprised of R&D intensity and growth stage of firm. To estimate empirical model, we were considered the existence of workforce shortages as dependent variable and the various explanatory variables: firm characteristics, industry, demand factors, supply factors, internal skill demand, etc. In particular, this study assumed that the PMS and HRM system are among the factors contributing to the lack of technical workforce. In addition, labor demand factors such as worker’s satisfaction and the correlation between the college major of a worker and her job are considered. Eventually, this paper showed that the above mentioned factors are significant explanatory variables addressing the workers shortage problem of SMEs. The examination that was conducted in this study showed that, putting the other imbalance factors aside, the deterministic factors contributing to the imbalance are firm size (number of employees) and geographic location of the company (metropolitan or non-metropolitan). In other words, the larger a company is, the closer it is to a metropolitan area, the more workforce it could easily attract. Also, the demand factors found to be significant are the value of sales per person, the proportion of the technology workforce to the total employees, average satisfaction of technology workforce, the correlation between college major and jobs, whether or not the company has PMS, and the firm’s inner HRM system. Also, as the high turnover means the workers have generally dissatisfaction with their jobs and create vacancies in a firm, he higher this value is, the more serious a company’s imbalance in technical workforce is observed. As for the technological factors, the technology level of a company, research and development (R&D) costs, and E&T were found to be significant. The higher the technical level of a company is, and the more it invests in R&D and in education, the more positive these factors’ correlation with the company’s demand for technical human resources is thought to be. As for the other industrial characteristics, they were divided into different industrial types, according to Pavitt (i.e., supply dominated industry, scale intensive industry, specialized suppliers, science based industry), and were analyzed. As mentioned above, in this study, the SMEs in Korea were classified according to their technological levels and growth stages, and the factors behind their workforce shortages were quantitatively analyzed. The technical level was classified into three types after combining one of three stages (high-, medium-, and low-technology stages) with one of four corporate development stages (start-up, penetration, growth, and restarting). The three corporate types identified were the high-tech start-ups, high-tech growing type, and low-tech increasing type based on the focus group interview results of the study on 35 SMEs that was carried out by Jang-Jun Song and Sunwoo Kim (2009). For the further analysis, the SMEs in Korea were classified into several types particularly to identify the factors that contributed to their shortage of technological workers (see Figure 1). As a result, it was found that the deterministic factors were found to differ according to firm types. In the model, where the subjects consisted of all the SMEs, the demand factor, supply factor, technology, demand for training, and internal HRM system were found to be important explanatory variables. When the analysis focus only on the high-tech start-ups, the firm characteristics, labor supply factor, technology level, demand for training, and HRM system were only found to be significant, whereas the once significant explanatory variables such as labor demand factors failed to significantly explain the tendency of the companies's shortage in workers. Conversely, the labor supply and demand factors, and the corporate and industrial characteristics, were found to be significant for the high-tech growing companies, but technology, demand for training, and internal HRM method were found to be insignificant. This is thought to be because the companies generally have high R&D investments and share similar forms of HRM environment. Lastly, labor demand factors, technology, and demand for training were found to be significant for the low-tech developing companies, and the rest of the factors were found to be insignificant. The results of the analysis showed that the factors that led to the lack of firm types in Korean SMEs differed according to the company type. This shows that the demand for or lack of technical workers can differ in accordance with the firm’s technological level. Second, the value of R&D investment, which indicates the demand for technical training, was generally a significant explanatory variable, and it was found that increasing such demand while carrying out vigorous R&D could increase the chances for a lack of technical workers to emerge. Third, it was found that investments in E&T could decrease the lack of technical personnel in low-tech increasing companies. Fourth, PMS and HRM types were found to be decisive factors leading to a significant shortage. This confirmed what is already apparent through statistical surveys, and showed that the shortage is affected by the internal management practices. Fifth, the turnover rate as a supply factor in our model was found to be a significant explanatory variable. When the turnover rate is high, the tendency to lack technical workers is likewise high. In addition, as opposed to the general speculation that the relatively small size of SMEs is one of the reasons for the their difficulties in securing workers, it was found to have hardly any influence it gives, which is noteworthy. Inversely, the technical characteristics or development stage (or level of maturity) of a SME, and its business management practices, represented by the PMS or the HRM systems, were found to be more important than the difference in corporate scale in terms of the workers shortage. Therefore, the major policy implications reflected by the analysis in this study are as follows. First, supply and demand imbalances have different causes according to the types of SMEs. Thus, there is a need for customizing policy that meets the needs of each type. Second, the problem of the lack of technical workers is affected not only by the external labor market environment but also by internal demand factors, and the internal HRM system; especially largely affects the shortages in the high-tech companies. Third, as the shortage rate is significant linked to the turnovers in workers, it is concluded that a policy that supports the maintenance of skilled workers in SMEs will largely contribute to stabilizing the demand supply condition. Especially, as turnover is one of the most significant problems for the high-tech companies, addressing such problem by establishing training programs in local areas and by cooperating with large companies will contribute, too. Lastly, it can be pointed out that there is a possibility that the lack of technical workers is not only quantitative issue but is qualitative in nature. However, the quantitative side of the technical human resources supply and demand imbalance problem has been stressed. Thus, there needs to be more careful analysis of the qualitative side of the imbalance that Korean SMEs face in the future.