By Kim Rahn



A secretary to the CEO of a foreign company's Korean affiliate, surnamed Choi, receives an annual salary of about 28 million won. Choi, who studied in New Zealand, got the position because of her strong English skills, which allow her to help the CEO with email and other tasks involving communication with the U.S. headquarters.



"For a secretary, my salary is very high," Choi said. "On a website for aspiring secretaries, I learned that the annual salary of secretaries for CEOs of midsize Korean companies is 20-22 million won."



She said there was not much difference between their jobs and hers, except that she uses English regularly while they use it only on rare occasions.



Foreign language skills are often an important factor in deciding wage levels, a report by the Korea Research Institute for Vocational Education & Training shows.



According to the report, workers in jobs that require foreign language ability received an average of 2.68 million won per month, nearly 600,000 won more than those in jobs not requiring such ability.



The report was based on a 2011 survey of 6,579 people who had graduated from university 18 months earlier. The researchers asked the respondents how important their foreign language skills were in helping them get those jobs, on a scale from one to five. Jobs with scores of four or five were classified as jobs that required foreign language skills.



According to the survey, 68.8 percent of respondents employed with foreign companies here said foreign language skills were among the most important qualifications. Some 53 percent of people at large conglomerates, 45.3 percent of workers at public companies, 33.2 percent of employees at educational institutions, 26.6 percent of people at small or midsize companies, and 20 percent of people at state-run organizations said the same.



"The salary gap comes mainly from the difference of companies they work for," Lee Eun-hye, a researcher at the institute, said.



"Foreign companies or large conglomerates, which require advanced foreign language skills, usually provide higher salaries than midsized companies or government organizations," she said.



"Even in one company, workers with advanced foreign language skills sometimes get higher wages than those without such skills if the company offers different salary levels according to each employee's work."



Lee said the salary gap was one of the reasons job seekers focused on studying English.



"It is not easy for job seekers to upgrade other qualifications for jobs, such as academic backgrounds, majors or personality," she said. "English test scores are almost the only thing which they can upgrade, so they focus on English or other language study."



