Promoting economic growth for the welfare of its population can only be achieved with a balanced development throughout the disciplines. This was the case for Korea, where the country was able to produce balanced number of highly qualified labor pools in every field. This balance, however, has been broken in recent years, as there has been a growing trend among young prospects to get into the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields, mainly due to reduced privileges that the field once enjoyed during the high growth era of 70’s. Government of Korea had taken serious note about the phenomenon, and initiated several measures, such as special scholarships for STEM fields, in order to counter the decline in STEM enrollment in both undergraduate and graduate candidates.

What is more urgent, however, is to examine the prospects for students in STEM fields after they leave school. Most current literatures in Korea solely focuses on the ‘training’ side (i.e. undergraduate or graduate experiences) rather than the ‘career’ side of the issue, such as career satisfaction for the STEM graduates and their ability to utilize their education in the real world.  This is especially true for female graduates, as STEM fields have been traditionally dominated by male graduates, which created the sort of exclusive environment that may face barriers in actually breaking into the field, even though they have received equal training and qualification as their male counterparts.

This study is intended to understand the career satisfactions for highly trained professionals in STEM fields. Therefore, the target population for this study has been limited to those with doctoral degrees in STEM fields in Korea. The study is divided into two research questions: 1) what are some of the factors influencing the job matching (meaning students landing in jobs related to their studies) among new graduates, and 2) what are correlations between job satisfactions and the job matching for doctoral graduates. Ordered logistic regression analysis was used to analyze the data obtained from a Korea 2013 Survey of Doctoral Recipients.

The study proved the existing theory that higher job matching crates the higher job satisfaction. However, the result showed somewhat lower satisfaction rates among female graduates, and the ones in STEM fields tend to have lower satisfaction rates than the non-STEM counterparts. This is an indication that while more and more female students are graduating in STEM fields, their job satisfaction tends to be lower than their male counterparts, or even non-STEM female graduates.

Results of this study provide two policy objectives: 1) without proper management and guidance to increase the actual career satisfaction, it will make sustainable inflow of new talents in STEM fields much harder, as new talents will be discouraged to even pursue studies in STEM fields due to lack of future prospects. 2) With higher percentages of STEM experts are now women than ever, more attention needs to be focused among policy makers to retain female professionals in the field after graduation.