A new report from the Bank of Korea(BOK) shows that for every year young people are unemployed, their real wages drop by six-point-seven percent and they potentially face weaker lifetime employment stability.

According to the BOK’s assessment of the lifetime impact of delayed labor market entry and housing cost burdens for the young generation, published Monday, the job search period for young people is only getting longer. 

The percentage of young people taking more than a year to land their first job was 24-point-one percent in 2004, but increased to 31-point-three percent in 2025.

The BOK said that’s the result of intensifying labor market rigidity and companies’ preference for hiring experienced workers.

If the period of unemployment for a young person lasted one year, the probability of them working in a regular position five years later was 66-point-one percent, but the figure dropped to 56-point-two percent if the unemployment period extended to three years.

The report revealed that when young people face prolonged unemployment in the early stages of their careers, they lose out on opportunities to increase their skills and earn more. 

This means that when young people struggle to enter the labor market, which is when they take their first steps in adult society, they can suffer both low wages and job insecurity.

The BOK said a similar phenomenon affected Japan’s “employment ice age generation,” which refers to people who entered the labor market in the mid-1990s to the early 2000s and faced severe, long-term hiring freezes after the country’s economic bubble burst.