A Study on the Job Career Patterns of Korean IT Personnel

With the increasing severity of the shortage of highly-skilled IT personnel, more and more attention is being paid to the professional career path and systematic career management of IT employees. Although some studies have been conducted to describe the current status of IT personnel, limited attempts have been made to analyze the career paths or career patterns of IT professionals from a longitudinal perspective. In this context, this study explored the job career patterns of IT professionals in Korea and examined their relationship with subjective and objective career success. To identify job career patterns over time, detailed information about jobs and positions were used and an optimal matching analysis (OMA) was conducted to calculate the dissimilarity matrix between employees’ career sequences, while a cluster analysis was used to categorize the meaningful groups based on this dissimilarity data. This analysis revealed that career patterns among Korean IT personnel are more varied than previously thought. These career types have a significant relationship with individual profiles, such as age, education, industry and company size, and account for significant variations in the three main career success variables, i.e. quality of life, assessment of software quality, and wage level. It is expected that the findings of this study will contribute to refining the Korean career path so as to retain IT personnel, and raise the need to improve the low quality of life and poor SW work environment of IT personnel.