Samsung to streamline job titles

Starting from March 1, the South Korean tech giant will remove seven top-down job titles – employee 1 (high school graduate), employee 2 (college graduate), employee 3 (university graduate), assistant manager, manager, senior manager and director. 
Instead, the company will apply a new horizontal ranking system that will categorise workers from career levels one to four, based on their performance, Samsung officials said.
Under the new system, Samsung Electronics employees will put “nim” or “pro” as the suffix on their names they call each other.
However, those ranking higher than director, such as team leaders, group leaders and executives will retain their job titles.
“By breaking the vertical rigidity, the new personnel system will help workers respect each other’s work performance, rather than the time they have spent at the company,” an official said.
Samsung Electronics’ reshuffling of job titles was originally planned in the first half of last year, but has been delayed due to a delay in the executive-level reshuffle, following the prosecutors’ investigation into the firm’s involvement in the Choi Soon-sil scandal.
The simplification of job titles have been adopted by other conglomerates such as SK in recent years. The trend, however, has also stoked skepticism for failing to tackle the fundamentally rigid hierarchy system or ill-fitting with the Korean culture where honorifics are used for those senior in rank and age.
Meanwhile, Despite an ongoing investigation by an independent counsel, Samsung Group and the tech giant’s de facto leader Lee Jae-yong seem to be preparing a set of reform plans to appease public anger and tighten the grip on management, local reports and market insiders said on Thursday.
Earlier this week, Samsung Group officially said it would disband the group’s future strategy office, which has long served as a control tower orchestrating overall business operations of Samsung affiliates. Local reports were suggesting that along with the disbandment of the decades-old control tower, Samsung could also announce a set of reform plans to seek a turnaround.
Samsung had carried out a similar scenario in 2008, when a set of reform plans were announced in April of that year, right before prosecutors wrapped up a high-profile investigation into Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee’s slush fund. 
This time, the announcement, if made, is likely to be at the end of this month when the independent counsel is set to complete its investigation.
Initiated by Lee Jae-yong, the chairman’s only son and the heir apparent, the group could seek a generational shift in management by replacing top executives who climbed the corporate ladder under the wings of Lee’s father, according to industry watchers.
The names being mentioned include the head and the deputy head of Samsung Group’s future strategy office, Choi Ji-sung and Chang Choong-ki.