Chilgok County Launches Job Convenience Store for Women

Chilgok County has opened the Chilgok branch of the Gyeongsangbuk-do Job Convenience Store, a specially designed employment support program that assists women in getting back to work after being away from their career due to childcare and caregiving.

Through the program, the county plans to offer short-term job opportunities together with childcare services while solving the problem of local businesses being unable to find workers.

The project which started functioning on July 1st day aims at working on the notion of women having to choose between work and children by giving them access to flexible work and childcare support. The county believes the program will empower women economically and help create a more diverse workforce at the local level.

Key Highlights:

• Chilgok County opened the Chilgok branch of the Gyeongsangbuk-do Job Convenience Store.
• This is an initiative to provide temporary jobs and child care for women who have taken breaks from their careers.
• It is intended to help women get back into the job market and assist local companies in solving their shortage of workers.

The Job Convenience Store is actually a work of Chilgok Women's Resources Development Center which is a premier local organization wholly dedicated to enhancing women's employment. Besides from providing job search support for women, the center also offers women employment-friendly platform to local SMEs and small businesses owners.

In this regard, the center has work-life balance care, welfare care, and career care among others as well as work-life balance align with the seven categories of support programs. Hiring women in local SMEs can be wage-subsidized under a program. This not only saves hiring cost but also helps to alleviate labor shortages in the local industrial sector.

The project does more than just align job seekers with positions by designing a personalized employment support system that also takes into account women's different phases in life and the time they spend on family care. In fact, with the help of this program, a woman who has interrupted her career route for family reasons will have a possibility to come back to work in a more flexible way.

Jaeuk Kim, Governor of Chilgok County, when commenting on the project, pointed out that facilitating the involvement of women in economic activities was a matter of changing the environment. Besides that, he assured that the county of Chilgok will be the one to assist the local businesses the most, by providing them with the workers they need, and moreover increase the employment opportunities for women as well as the contribution to the revitalization of the local economy.

The Job Convenience Store illustrates Chilgok County's overall effort to tackle one of women's main obstacles to employment not a shortage of willingness to work, but rather a lack of work environment supporting women. Through a combination of employment-related help and childcare and caregiving support, this project aims to foster a situation in which women can develop lasting careers at the same time as enhancing the local economy and community.