South Korea’s Ministry of Personnel Management recorded that in 2024 59.3% of general voluntary resignations from the central government (12,013 people) came from employees with fewer than five years of service, and the number of 21-30-year-old civil servants who resigned voluntarily doubled from 2,441 in 2015 to 5,105 in 2024. Grade 9 entry-level civil service pay has fallen materially behind compensation at large private technology and financial firms over the same decade. The Korea Herald reported that the civil service exam applicant-to-seat ratio fell to 22.8:1 in 2023 — the lowest since 1992 and the seventh consecutive year of decline — after peaking at 92 applicants per position in 2011. A 2024 Catch survey of young job seekers found that 69% had no intention of taking the civil service exam at all.
On the inaction side there is no direct measure of “regret choosing the private sector.” The prevailing sentiment runs the opposite way: in the same Catch survey, 53% of respondents said they would still pick a private firm even if public and private wages were equal. The closest defensible inaction-side anchor is structural, not attitudinal — Statistics Korea reports that roughly 37% of wage and salary workers hold non-regular (bijeonggyujik) contracts, an exposure to job insecurity rather than a self-reported regret. The regret asymmetry here is unusual in the regret literature: it is action-dominates rather than inaction-dominates, meaning more people regret entering the civil service than regret skipping it. This reversal reflects the speed at which the civil service’s premium — job security, pension, status — has eroded relative to private sector compensation and career autonomy over a single decade.
Both regret rates carry significant measurement caveats. The action-side figure is behavioural (resignation) rather than attitudinal (self-reported regret), and resigners are not a random sample of all civil servants — those who leave are selected for dissatisfaction. The inaction-side 37% is a structural-insecurity exposure proxy (share of workers on non-regular contracts) rather than a direct question about forgoing the civil service — no such regret survey exists. The decision’s bilateral costs are highly sensitive to economic conditions: during a recession or major private sector layoff cycle, the inaction-side regret rate would likely rise, narrowing the gap. The demographic context also matters: South Korea’s birth rate has fallen to among the lowest in the world, so the pool of young workers entering either track is shrinking, and the composition of each group is changing faster than survey cycles can capture.