Executive Summary
As digital transformation (DX) has become an essential strategy for corporate survival and
growth, DX progress among Korean firms shows a clear gap by firm size. DX stages tend to rise
with firm size, yet according to the 2025 SW Convergence Survey, 64.4% of mid-sized firms with
100 to 299 employees remain at the preparation stage, a level similar to that of small firms
with 50 to 99 employees (61.8%). Unlike small firms, whose constraints in workforce and
resources are evident, mid-sized firms possess a certain scale of organization and resources, and
their remaining at a level similar to small firms warrants an examination of the underlying
causes. In addition, current DX support policies are centered on subsidies for technology adoption
costs and large-scale project programs, so that instruments directly supporting the securing and
reskilling of the workforce needed to operate the adopted technologies are limited. As a result,
there appears to be a policy gap in workforce-related DX support for mid-sized firms.
Improving the effectiveness of workforce support policies for mid-sized firms under limited
budgets requires tailored design that reflects firm characteristics rather than uniform support,
yet there is currently little empirical reference on which workforce composition is associated with
which areas of DX. In particular, beyond the sheer size of the SW workforce, it has not been
sufficiently examined what roles finer dimensions of workforce composition, such as the ability to
operate new technologies, academic major, and degree level, play in initiating DX and in
advancing maturity. Accordingly, this study applies OLS regression controlling for industry and
employment size to firms with 100 to 299 employees in the 2025 SW Convergence Survey, and
empirically examines how the absolute size of the SW professional workforce (RQ1), the share of
personnel capable of operating new technologies (RQ2), the share of SW majors (RQ3), and the
share of personnel with master's or doctoral degrees (RQ4) are each associated with DX stage
and DX maturity across six areas: governance, people and organization, process, value
proposition, customer relationship, and technology and capability.
The results are twofold. First, firms in the upper group of SW professional workforce size
show consistently higher levels of DX stage and of all six maturity areas, indicating that the size
of the SW workforce is associated with the overall DX level. Second, the DX areas associated
with each dimension of workforce composition differ. DX stage is significantly associated with the
share of personnel capable of operating new technologies, a result also found in a supplementary
model of DX initiation, whereas no significant association with DX stage is found for the share of
SW majors or the share of advanced-degree holders. Instead, the share of SW majors shows
relatively large differences in the governance and customer relationship areas, the share of
advanced-degree holders in the people and organization, governance, and customer relationship
areas, and the share of new-technology personnel in the technology and capability and process
areas, suggesting that the maturity areas most closely associated with each workforce dimension
differ. As this analysis is a cross-sectional association study, it cannot establish causality, and the
possibility that firms more advanced in DX have hired more SW personnel cannot be ruled out;