The Sorrows of Director C, an Executive Official in Seoul's Autonomous Districts?

Seoul District Young Directors Appeal Difficulties of Being Unable to Transfer to Other Districts... Lamenting the Plight of Career Officials Under Elected District Heads

[Asia Economy Reporter Jong-il Park] “The chief said to move to another district, but there’s nowhere to go...”

Recently, Director C of a district office in Seoul voiced this complaint. Director C was promoted to director at a relatively young age during the previous district mayor’s term.

However, after the district mayor who promoted him in the 8th local election lost, and a competing district mayor was elected, Director C has been stigmatized as a person of the former mayor, causing these difficulties.

In districts, when a relatively young manager with many years until retirement is promoted to director, it creates a bottleneck because there are no promotion positions available for managers and team leaders below.

For this reason, districts like Seongdong-gu and the former Dongdaemun-gu often promote managers who are close to retirement as a strategic measure(?) to secure a chain of promotion positions.

However, Director C still has about five years left to serve, including the current district mayor’s four-year term, and will continue working. Because of this, the current district mayor seems to have requested Director C to transfer to Seoul City or another district.

Seoul City has a relatively large number of employees and some flexibility, which allowed two Grade 4 (director-level) officials from Dongjak-gu to transfer this time, but other districts do not have such flexibility.

Other districts require the current district mayor to offer the merit of promotion to managers to assign work, so there is no reason to accept a young director like Director C, who still has many years until retirement, from another district.

Because of this, Director C is in a difficult position with no good options. Moreover, the director position in a district is directly below the district mayor, making the situation more awkward.

Meanwhile, Director K of another Seoul district reportedly resigned after facing similar pressure.

Like Director C, Director K entered Seoul City’s Grade 9 civil service immediately after graduating high school and was promoted to director early due to long civil service experience.

Such difficulties are sometimes experienced by young directors in Seoul districts.

Additionally, Directors L and S of other districts had to move from being the first director, the Administrative Director, to the district council secretariat director. This is because the first director might be misunderstood as having played an unseen role for the former district mayor during the election process.

A senior official from a Seoul district said, “Since the head of the organization is an elected position, some senior civil servants may face such difficulties after elections,” describing the atmosphere.

Meanwhile, during the 5th local election term, one Seoul district caused controversy by sending dozens of employees, including directors and managers, to other districts.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.