1. Necessity of employing professional foreign personnel

What companies need as they prepare for global competition is to provide world-class cutting-edge products and services at competitive prices. For this purpose, most Korean companies have used highly qualified Korean personnel, but in a world becoming one integrated market, maintaining world-class competitiveness is proving more and more difficult with such a limited supply of personnel. Accordingly, companies feel the need to hire from overseas those professional personnel that they cannot employ easily inside Korea. In addition, small and medium sized companies need to hire those highly qualified personnel at a reasonable cost. Employing such professional foreign personnel requires an E-7 visa.
Korean use of foreign personnel has been mostly focused on using them to solve a shortage of labor for small and medium-sized companies. As of the end of December, 2015, the number of foreigners staying in Korea is 1.86 million people, and is increasing every year. Of this number, 62,000 are eligible for employment, with at least 90% working manual jobs. The visas involved (479,426 people) include E-9 (non-professional employment), H-2 (working visit for overseas Koreans), and E-10 (seafarer employment). Most of the remaining 10% (50,000 people) hold E-1 through E-7 visas for professional employment: university professors (E-1), native speakers for foreign language studies (E-2), researchers (E-3), technicians for technology transfer (E-4), certified profession holders (E-5), art workers (E-6), and other professional job holders (E-7).
Generally, the E-7 visa is granted to personnel employed for professional positions, which covers various fields. In their plans to hire these overseas personnel, companies need to confirm whether visa issuance is possible, and then obtain eligibility from the Immigration Office for those personnel to stay in Korea, before initiating the hiring process. In this article, I would like to look into this employment process for hiring professional personnel, and government support systems for such hiring.

[Source: Ministry of Law, as of July 1, 2015]

2. Process for Hiring Professional Foreign Personnel (E-7 Visa)

(1) E-7 Visa holders (for specific activities)
Professional foreigners eligible for E-7 visas need to have the following characteristics in general. Firstly, the specialty, qualifications, technological and other skills of the corresponding foreigners shall be directly related to the companies where they are to work. Secondly, those foreigners shall not become engaged in simple labor, but professionally skilled or technical jobs. Thirdly, it shall be necessary to hire those foreigners because of the difficulty involved in finding Korean citizens to fill those positions. The E-7 visa encompasses 79 jobs, broken into two categories: 1) job activities determined by contract with public or private institutions and 2) cutting-edge technology jobs such as information technology.


(2) Issuance of the E-7 Visa
In order to hire professional foreign personnel in Korea, the company shall need to have issued an E-7 visa from the Immigration Office of the Ministry of Justice. Generally, the company can hire professional foreign personnel from abroad after receiving the Certificate of Eligibility for Visa Issuance for those personnel, and in some cases, it is possible to hire professional foreigners already staying in Korea by changing their visa status to E-7. The typical occurrence in cases like this is for foreign students graduating from Korean colleges with D-2 visas to have their visa status changed to E-7 after employment. The necessary documents for an E-7 visa are described in the following table.



3. Government Support Systems to Promote Employment of Professional Foreign Personnel (E-7)

Various government systems have been set up to promote the employment of foreign professionals, and in relation to E-7 Visa. There are three main systems, which are 1) the IT Card system of the Ministry of Information & Communication; 2) the Gold Card System of the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy; and 3) the Employment of Foreign Professionals Support system of the Small & Medium Business Administration.

(1) IT Card System (Ministry of Information & Communication)
The IT card system is an institutional system designed to attract to Korea leading foreign personnel and plays an important role in 1) helping to meet the shortage of IT professionals and acquiring advanced technology, issuing the relevant Minister's recommendations in the course of hiring them, and 2) in mitigating the rising cost of domestic IT professionals while globalizing the Korean IT industry. Corporate entities intending to hire overseas IT engineers are eligible for employment recommendation by applying to the Korea IT Ventures Association (KOIVA). KOIVA will review the prospective employee's qualifications and evaluate the cutting-edge technology He/she possesses, and then issue a Letter of Employment Recommendation from the Minister of Information & C


(2) Gold Card System (Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy)
The Gold Card System is designed to attract overseas technical personnel by providing them preferential treatment under the Immigration Control Act through employment recommendations issued by the general secretary of the Industrial Technology Foundation on behalf of the Minister of Trade, Industry & Energy to companies intending to hire overseas technical personnel, and subsidizing the issuance of E-7 visas. The relevant fields are information technology and e-business like online commerce, biotechnology, nanotechnology, advanced materials (metal, ceramic, chemical), transportation material, digital home appliances, environment and energy, etc.


(3) Employment of Foreign Professionals Support system (Small & Medium Business Corporation: SBC)
This system was introduced to support small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in obtaining access to advanced technology through employment of the necessary overseas personnel from Russia, India, and other nations to eliminate the shortages SMEs face in the relevant fields and contribute to the promotion of international competitiveness through the development of new technologies.


(4) Science Card System (Ministry of Science & Technology)


4. Comments

Nowadays, hiring foreign professionals is no longer an option, but is becoming essential. In a global market with worldwide competition, those with better technology and able to provide more competitive products survive. This requires companies to work hard to acquire world-class, highly-trained personnel from many fields at a reasonable labor cost. The E-7 visa is designed to facilitate such acquisitions in an effort to support companies in maintaining and improving their competitiveness.