Research on the Items of Importance and Satisfaction for Employability in the Korean Information Communication Technology Sector

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

I read your study with interest. The manuscript is attractive due to the researched topic and the obtained results. I can provide you with some suggestions for improving the reviewed version:

1. The terms importance and satisfaction are defining for your research. Maybe you can include them in the title.

2. In the abstract you could add at least one sentence related to the research results.

3. Research directions (lines 39-42, 45-48) would be better placed at the end of the introduction, the formulation of a hypothesis would also be useful.

4. References cited are few in number and some are more than 10 years old.....it would be helpful to include more new references.

5. Certain references are excessively cited (7, 8, 25). Example: Source 25 (lines 160, 164, 169, 174, 180, 221, 222).

6. Table 2 includes a synthesis of information from reference 8/Zaharim, A. (Employability skills highlighted for 4 Asian countries: Malaysia, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong). South Korea is nevertheless a leading economic and industrial force in the region and even globally. Are there no studies that identify the specific skills of this country?

7. Lines 119-126: The references/sources of this presented information are missing.

8. There is a lack of data related to the validity and reliability of the questionnaire used in the research. Does it have a Likert scale associated with it?

9. Line 313: .......... and 7 items on demographic and basic information. Table 4 includes 6 independent variables, not 7: Gender, Age, Academic career, Employed organization, Work Experience and Rank/Position.

10. I think table 4 would be more useful in the participants section, not the results.

11. Could you specify what is the role of presenting the values of the correlation coefficients at the level of the items in table 5....

12. The ANOVA results (lines 366-402) are more difficult to understand by presenting them in text.....perhaps a summary of them in a table would be clearer. The presentation of the results by mean values and associated ranks (Tables 7-10) is easy to understand. However, the large number of defined independent variables and their levels (only for Age there are 5 levels) would have generated interesting comparisons between the formed pairs, with levels of statistical significance, effect size or interaction between variables/MANOVA (eg gender* Work experience or gender*age etc.). Maybe you can include them in future publications, they would provide complex and detailed information for your study.

13. Conclusions can be better correlated with research directions.

Author Response

Please, refer to the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

The research topic covers very important issues. I just have some suggestions to your work.

It will be better to provide the graphical interpretation of analysis results. More deep statistics could be added in Appendix. The research limitations should be described in discussion. Despite the study focuses mainly on Korean and 4 neighborhood countries, more literature position from another countries could be discussed. The [7] position, which you have based on, is quite old. It is from 2013.  I think the future research perspectives have described properly. The pandemics brings the new skills requirements. As you said in conclusion it should be taken into the consideration. 

Minor revisions should be done.

Author Response

Please, refer to the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The article contains serious errors.

The introduction announced that the article deals with the demand side, which is not the case. A reference to artificial intelligence and its impact on the labor market was also announced - this was not reflected in the article.

Employability is a concept related to the supply side of the labor market. The article should be extended in part of employability with a few paragraphs on human capital. Human capital is not (p.4) the ability to use social networks (rather, it is social capital). Many of the definitions of human capital refer to employability (including the ability to find and change jobs).

In my opinion, the statement that in the case of engineers "soft" competences are more important than "hard" (p. 6) is a misleading simplification. Graduates of engineering schools lack "soft" competencies, because 80-90% of the time they study takes them to acquire "hard" competencies.

More literature should appear in the article, including research on differences between men and women in "economic" and "social" preferences (the latter are of greater interest to women).

It is not possible to refer to the "demand" side in the interpretation of the results if the research concerned employees and their preferences (the employer is the supply side).

Author Response

Please, refer to the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Most of the errors I have identified have been removed from the article. In my opinion, the authors' insistence in the introduction that they mainly examine the demand side is a mistake. First, the survey was aimed at employees (and not employers). Secondly, the term "employability" refers to workers and thus to the supply side.

Author Response

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 

- Most of the errors I have identified have been removed from the article.

-> We appreciate this comment.

 

In my opinion, the authors' insistence in the introduction that they mainly examine the demand side is a mistake. First, the survey was aimed at employees (and not employers). Secondly, the term "employability" refers to workers and thus to the supply side.

-> We agree with the reviewer’s comment, so we removed the vague sentence “This study focuses on the demand side (number of jobs or headcount) of the labor market rather than the supply side” in Lines 61-62. The remained sentences are as follows.

 

Usually, based on a contract, the employer, a corporation, a not-for-profit organization, a cooperative, or any other entity pays the employee in return for executing the assigned work [15]. The renewed emphasis on employability assumes a more significant role for markets to operate in skills and competence development. It implies a switch in focus from a demand-side approach to a supply-side approach in labor market policy [16]. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf