Seoul's Seongbuk-gu announced Wednesday that it won the excellence award in the public disclosure category at the 2026 National Local Government Jobs Competition, an annual event organized by the Ministry of Employment and Labor and held in Seoul.
The competition evaluates local governments nationwide on their job-creation initiatives from the previous year, recognizing outstanding cases and sharing best practices. This year, all 243 metropolitan and basic local governments took part.
Seongbuk-gu proactively responded to the challenges of an aging population and a prolonged economic slowdown, pushing tailored employment policies closely tied to residents' daily lives — including job creation for vulnerable groups and revitalization of neighborhood commercial districts. As a result, the district recorded an overall employment rate of 64.1%, a youth employment rate of 40.5% and a women's employment rate of 59.4%, marking clear year-on-year gains across major employment indicators.
To support young people's entrepreneurial ambitions and career growth, the district activated the Gireumno Youth Startup Street centered on the Seongbuk Youth Smart Startup Center, while also running programs to subsidize certification exam fees for unemployed youth as part of a broad effort to strengthen job-readiness and startup capacity.
The district also focused on reviving its locally rooted fashion-sewing industry and neighborhood economy, building the largest fashion-sewing infrastructure in Seoul and designating new alley-type commercial districts through deregulation to bolster the self-sufficiency of small business owners.
In addition, Seongbuk-gu created distinctive education-linked jobs — including "play curators" and "education support managers" tied to child-friendly city infrastructure — and successfully ran "Halmaejung Gukbap," a self-sustaining senior employment model, among other specialized job programs unique to the district.
"It is deeply meaningful that we achieved better employment outcomes than the previous year by responding proactively to changing local conditions, even as the job market contracted amid an economic slowdown," district mayor Lee Seung-ro said. "We will continue to build Seongbuk into a resilient and sustainable jobs city that every resident can feel, under our vision of creating quality jobs through startup vitalization and a cooperative economy."
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