Photo credit: Korean Times
The Korean shipbuilding industry’s heavy reliance on migrant workers has led domestic shipyards to devise various measures to help their foreign workers improve their foreign workers to improve their fluency in Korean.
The Korea Times reports that after beginning to teach migrant workers the language during the shipbuilding industry boom in the 4early 2000s, major local shipbuilders have recently renewed these efforts to prevent language barriers from causing industrial accidents amid the latest upturn in the sector.
On Sunday, about 500 foreign nationals working at HD Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) shipyard and in Ulsan took the HD test of Korean for Practical Industrial Communication (TOPIC), which was jointly developed by the company and the University of Ulsan last September to test language proficiency, which is required for shipbuilding.
The central and local governments have supported the industry’s efforts by opening training centres in the home countries of migrant shipyard workers to teach them Korean and the skills needed for shipbuilding.
