Industry-University Cooperative Education for Regional Job Creation : Focusing on the LINC Project

The economic growth based on the technology-leading model expands the demand for the high-quality human resources. On the technology frontier, the forecast of workforce demand as well as picking the winning businesses is not easy. It means that the role of the pre-emptive expansion of education in selective fields to support the quick growth of businesses and industries has decreased. The pre-emptive expansion of education is defined as the expansion of the supply of graduates in the selective fields that government chooses to promote. Although Korea has benefited from the pre-emptive expansion of education in a broad sense during the rapid industrialization period, the role of this strategy becomes less effective for the technology frontier.Instead, the importance of the region-based workforce policy grows in reducing skill and job mismatches. Now, the pre-emptive expansion of education is expected to be the form of the industry-university cooperative education and to be adjusted in the region.The Leaders in Industry-university Cooperation (LINC) Project, which was launched in 2012, is expected to strengthen the competitiveness of regional universities and to achieve balanced regional development. The LINC Project emphasizes on job-based education and training such as customized curriculums and entrepreneurship education to raise the employment rate of local university graduates. Unlike past industry-university cooperation projects which were merged into the LINC Project in 2012, the LINC Project tries to change the university system itself to foster the industry-university cooperation. Also, the LINC Project includes non-engineering fields, which will support the job creation in the local service industry