Korean office workers are paying their own money to learn AI tools

A growing number of Korean office workers are paying for AI classes out of their own pockets. One marketer spent 1 million won ($700) on a two-day course. She says the main reason was fear of falling behind colleagues who were getting better at the tools.

What is happening

Lim, 40, works as a marketer at a large corporation. She spent a weekend in Seoul learning Claude Code, an AI coding agent made by the U.S. company Anthropic. The class ran nine hours each day with about a dozen office workers. She learned to connect the tool to email, calendars, and document tools, and to automate repetitive tasks.

Lim now uses AI for research, comparing materials, drafting reports, and finding records of past projects. She says AI is involved in 70 to 80 percent of her work. Shin, 30, took the same course even though he does not use Claude Code at work. He calls it an investment that could help if he takes on new duties or changes jobs.

Pressure from the workplace

Not everyone is learning by choice. Hwang, 38, works at a foreign company that shows weekly AI usage scores for each person and each department. The scores are not part of formal job reviews. Still, she sometimes uses AI to rewrite even simple emails. She says she does not want to drag down her department's average.

What the numbers say

• A Google-backed survey of 1,057 Korean adults found 74% were interested in AI skills training.
• Among employed respondents, 82% expected AI skills to matter to their jobs within five years.
• In a study of 305 workers, 57.4% named a sense of achievement as a positive of using AI.
• In the same study, 52.1% named the burden of learning new technology as a negative.

Who should pay

Oh, 37, says she feels pressured when her company says learning AI would be beneficial. In her view, a company that expects AI use should also provide training and cover the costs. The study fits that view. Education and training was the most common response employees wanted from organizations, chosen by 41.3% of respondents.

The article does not say how many companies currently pay for AI training. Free tutorial videos on Claude Code are also available on YouTube, which the report notes covers installation through workflow automation.