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Employment Insurance Refund Courses · Employer Training Support

Employment Insurance Refund Training

📂HRD & Training⏱2 min read📊Practical🔗10 related

What are Employment Insurance refund courses?

In one line
A program in which part of the training costs an employer pays for its employees is reimbursed from the Employment Insurance Fund. If you meet the requirements, it works as additional budget, letting the same spend fund more training.
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⚡ Summary in 3 lines
  • Employer-borne training costs supported by the Employment Insurance Fund
  • You must complete a course approved by the Ministry of Employment and Labor
  • Smaller companies get more favorable support rates

Once you start using refund-eligible courses, the order of training planning changes. Normally you decide first 'what should we teach?', but when refunds are in the picture, 'does this course meet the approval requirements?' moves to the front. Course design, provider selection, and scheduling are all tied to the approval and reporting steps that must be completed before training starts. So a training manager's job does not end with booking an instructor. It extends into administrative work that runs through attendance tracking, record keeping, and claiming reimbursement.

The support structure varies along three main dimensions. The first is company size. Priority-support companies (for example, manufacturers with 500 or fewer employees) receive a higher support rate than large corporations, and the refund cap is calculated from the employment insurance premiums (the vocational competency development portion) that the workplace has paid. The second is the training method. Classroom, on-site, remote, and blended formats each have different unit rates, minimum training hours, and completion criteria. Classroom training is judged by attendance rate, and remote training by progress rate and assessment, with 80% being the usual threshold. The third is who delivers it: in-house training run by your own instructors, or training outsourced to an external provider. The National Tomorrow Learning Card issued to individual workers and work-learning dual programs, a structured training scheme for new hires, differ in who is eligible and who administers them, so managing them together leads to confusion. Detailed unit rates and percentages are revised by public notice every year, so recheck them when you set the budget early in the year.

The most common mistake in practice is assuming 'the training provider will take care of it.' Checking whether a course is accredited, keeping the trainee roster, retaining attendance records, and meeting claim deadlines: the final responsibility rests with the employer. If you take a provider at its word and run a course without an accreditation number, millions of won can vanish. The second pitfall is attendance. Filling gaps with proxy signatures or attendance sheets completed after the fact turns a simple missed refund into improper receipt, which brings repayment of the subsidy, additional penalties, and a period of restricted support. The third is losing sight of the goal. If you only pick refundable courses, the training you actually need gets left out, and employees start asking 'why are we taking this?' A refund is a way to lower the cost of training you need, not the criterion for choosing training topics.

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💡 In plain English
Like a year-end tax refund, it is a program where the government returns part of what you spent on training if you meet the requirements.
Why it matters in practice
It is effectively 'additional budget' that lets the same spend fund more training. If you miss the refund requirements (attendance rate, completion criteria, application deadline), you lose money you could have received.
Origin and sources

It is rooted in the vocational competency development program that began alongside the introduction of employment insurance in 1995, and it is run to encourage companies to invest in training for current employees.

Source · Employment Insurance Act · Ministry of Employment and Labor, vocational skills development training support program · View source
An example

Consider a hypothetical case. Company A makes auto parts, with 180 employees and annual revenue of KRW 42 billion (≈ US$31,423,000). Its annual training budget is KRW 30 (≈ US$1) million, but with a large share of three-shift production staff, attendance was inconsistent. Earlier this year, the HR team went back through last year's accounts and found that the refunds received were far too small compared with the amount spent.

  1. When Ms. Kim in HR checked last year's 12 training programs one by one, two leadership courses had missed the accreditation application before training began, leaving about KRW 6.4 million (≈ US$4,790) out of the refund.
  2. In the report to the CEO, Manager Kim said, "I'm not asking for more training budget. We've already spent KRW 6.4 million (≈ US$4,790) that we aren't getting back," and the course restructuring was approved on the spot.
  3. HR asked its three contracted training providers for their accredited course numbers and session-by-session schedules. One provider kept replying only that it was "currently applying for accreditation this quarter," so it was dropped from this year's contracts.
  4. When the three-shift schedule kept pushing attendance below the 80% threshold, Manager Kim consulted six production team leads and split the 4-hour course into two 2-hour evening sessions, scanning and filing the attendance sheet after every session.
  5. As a result, 11 of this year's 14 courses qualified for refunds and the company recovered KRW 11.8 million (≈ US$8,830). With the same KRW 30 million (≈ US$22,400) budget, it ran 4 more courses than last year.
Related terms
Statutory Mandatory TrainingA general term for training that companies must provide to employees under relevant laws. Failure to comply can result in fines and other penalties.Training System DesignStarting from company strategy and the desired talent profile, this work structures the competencies employees need and the courses that build them, by level and by job function. The result is summarized in a single training framework chart.Training Needs Analysis · TNATraining Needs Analysis (TNA) identifies the gap between current and desired performance, then isolates the part of that gap that training can actually solve.E-Learning · Online LearningTraining delivered online or digitally. By removing limits of time and place, it has become the standard in corporate training.Annual Training Plan · Training BudgetThe work of deciding who gets trained in what, at what cost, over the year, and allocating funds accordingly. It sets the rhythm of a training manager’s year.Completion Criteria · Attendance ManagementThe practice of managing the conditions for recognizing course completion, along with the attendance and assessment records behind them. It is a prerequisite for receiving subsidies and for recognizing completion.Work-Study Dual SystemA program in which companies combine on-the-job and off-site training for the learner-workers they hire, to develop job-ready talent, with government support and accreditation.Employment Subsidies · Employment IncentivesGovernment subsidies paid to employers to support job creation, retention, and stability. Requirements and support levels change every year.Training Year-End Closing · Budget Execution ReportThe year-end process of tallying how much of the annual training budget was spent, and where, against plan. It is reported to management with reasons for unused or carried-over funds, and the results become the basis for next year’s budget request.Training Expense Tax Credit · Human Resource Development Tax CreditA tax incentive that lets companies deduct a set percentage of qualifying human resource development costs, spent on employees’ job training, from corporate or income tax. Credit rates and eligible scope vary with company size and tax law amendments.
Learning paths that include this term
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Last updated 13 Sep 2026 · Reviewed by John Kim

FAQ

No. Only courses accredited by the Ministry of Employment and Labor qualify, and hobby or general-interest training is excluded.
Calculation criteria vary by training hours, delivery method, and company size. The annual cap is tied to the employment insurance premiums paid (the vocational skills development portion).
Contracted training providers often handle the administrative work. Even so, the company should track application deadlines and completion requirements itself to avoid gaps.
Yes. In-house training programs are also eligible if they receive course accreditation in advance. However, the course design and administrative requirements are stricter than for outsourced training, so it suits recurring training at a meaningful scale.