Founded in 1999, Hunet pioneered South Korea's online corporate training market
'Knowledge-delivery e-learning will decline — but AI-driven education will grow'
Hyper-personalization and hybrid learning to sharpen training outcomes
'Corporate education must become an industry — K-edu will lead the world'
Aiming for longevity over listing, Jo envisions a century-old institution
"Corporate education needs its own storied institution — a 'grand maison' like Hermès. Hunet wants to be that."
That is the vision Jo Young-tak has carried through 27 years at the helm of Hunet, the corporate training company he founded. Rather than chasing a quick valuation boost through a stock market listing, Jo wants to build a company that endures for a century in the single field of corporate education.
"What I truly want is a long-lasting, traditional company in corporate education," Jo said in an interview. "My dream is to be remembered as a grand maison in this field — like Hermès or Porsche." On the question of a listing, he said he is "thinking in the direction of not going public." As for Hunet's future beyond its founder, he said he is keeping all options open — including a family succession or a professional management structure — and thinking about it with a long-term horizon.
Built on the internet, now pivoting to AI
When Jo founded Hunet in 1999, corporate training in South Korea was almost entirely offline. Watching the internet begin to disrupt industries from bookstores to newspapers, he concluded that corporate education could make the same shift online.
The company started in the business-to-consumer space, offering online management courses for working professionals — covering human resources, marketing, accounting and finance. From 2010, Hunet moved aggressively into the business-to-business corporate training market. "We started at around tenth place in B2B and have gradually climbed to first," Jo said. "There was no single decisive turning point — we just kept trying new things and grew."
Just as the internet transformed corporate education 27 years ago, Jo now sees AI as the next great disruptor. He expects generative AI to erode a significant portion of conventional online learning — but views that not as a threat to Hunet so much as an opportunity to create an entirely new corporate training market.
"Pure knowledge-delivery e-learning will decline," Jo said, "because you can just ask AI and get the information you need right away." At the same time, he is bullish on education that harnesses AI, predicting it will grow substantially.
The key concept is hyper-personalization. Conventional corporate training typically delivers the same course to large groups of employees, but AI makes it possible to tailor content to each individual's level and job function — and to narrow the gap between training and actual work.
"The question companies always ask when they invest in training is ultimately whether it actually works," Jo said. "With AI, you can identify exactly what each person knows and does not know through conversation, and you can bring real work problems into the session and solve them together with AI — connecting education directly to performance outcomes."
'I think we've only reached 1 percent'
Jo's openness to change is rooted in a management principle he has long championed: "Always 1 percent." No matter how much the company grows, he tells himself it has only reached 1 percent of its potential — a discipline against complacency.
"The biggest management principle is not to get arrogant just because things are going a little well," Jo said. "Even when sales hit 100 billion won ($74.6 million), I think: we have reached about 1 percent — we still have 99 percent to go."
Another long-standing practice: Jo has never had a private office. The habit traces back to roughly a decade he spent at a large conglomerate early in his career, where the hierarchical culture was so entrenched that a junior employee's proposal could take months to work its way up to the CEO for approval.
Inspired by an Intel CEO he read about who worked alongside employees without a separate office, Jo resolved that he would not have one until Hunet grew bigger than Intel. He has shared an open workspace with his staff for about 25 years since.
Hunet is also well known for its "happiness management" philosophy. In keeping with that ethos, the company introduced a four-day workweek in 2022 — cutting working days without reducing pay, a move that in effect raised labor costs for the company.
"It is hard to say definitively that the four-day week made the company better or worse," Jo said, "but employee satisfaction and happiness have risen, and the policy has attracted a lot of good talent."
The ground rule, however, is clear: work that used to take five days must be completed in four — not pushed to the following week. "The intensity and focus during those four days has gone up considerably," Jo added.
'Corporate education must grow into a full industry'
Behind Jo's insistence on growing Hunet's scale is a broader ambition: to turn corporate education itself into a proper industry.
"Many companies in corporate education are content with annual sales of 1 billion to 3 billion won, but I always thought we had only reached 1 percent," he said. "I had an ambition to industrialize corporate education." Hunet posted sales of 82.6 billion won and an operating profit of 4.1 billion won last year.
Jo believes a larger market attracts better talent and raises service quality across the board. Just as large law firms and accounting firms lead their sectors, he argues that corporate education needs dominant players to expand the industry as a whole.
"Corporate education is ultimately about developing people, and developing people connects not just to a company's competitiveness but to national competitiveness," Jo said. "I feel a sense of mission that a leading company must drive the industrialization of corporate education."
The next frontier is the global market. Jo said he has focused on South Korea until now, but sees improving conditions for overseas expansion as AI advances.
"One of the biggest barriers for an education company going abroad has always been language, and AI is tearing that barrier down — while the profile of Korean content is also rising," he said. "I want to build up more strength at home and then create a company that leads K-edu and corporate education worldwide."
Jo Young-tak's career: born in 1965; graduated from Seoul National University with a degree in business administration in 1989; joined Kumho Group in 1988; obtained a certified public accountant license in 1996; founded Hunet in 1999; launched the Happy Management Story newsletter in 2003; established the Happy Management nonprofit association in 2017.
boo@heraldcorp.com
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