Cultural Reflections: Kimjang and the Power of Collective Effort: The Hidden Skills First-Gen Professionals Carry
- Sep 29
- 5 min read
The first frost hasn’t arrived yet, but in kitchens across Korea, families are already gathering for 김장 (kimjang). Giant tubs of napa cabbage crowd the floor. Gloves are pulled on. Korean red chili powder, garlic, and ginger perfume the air. The work is long, repetitive, and sometimes exhausting. But it is shared. No one person carries the whole weight, because everyone contributes to making enough kimchi to last the winter.
Kimjang isn’t just about food. It’s a scene of hands moving in rhythm, laughter cutting through fatigue, and the quiet assurance that everyone is provided for because everyone contributed. UNESCO recognized it as an intangible cultural heritage, noting that it sustains community spirit, cooperation, and resilience. For many who grew up in immigrant households, kimjang — or its cultural equivalents — is more than a memory. It’s a blueprint for how we learned to move through the world: sharing resources, pooling effort, and ensuring no one is left without.
Why Kimjang and the Power of Collective Effort Matter
Originally, kimjang was about ensuring families survived winter. But even with grocery stores on every corner, the practice endures. Why? Because kimjang is about more than preservation of food. It’s about preserving connection, identity, and shared responsibility.
And this is where first-gen and diverse professionals often carry forward something powerful. Many of us learned early that effort is shared. Whether in kitchens, fields, or family living rooms, the message was clear: our contribution keeps the whole strong.
Even if you didn’t grow up with kimjang, chances are you’ve experienced something like it — Sunday dinners where every aunt brought a dish, neighborhood cleanups, or the group projects where the work was uneven but the result was shared. These echoes remind us that collective effort is part of the human story.
Global Parallels of Shared Labor
Korea isn’t the only place where culture encodes collaboration. Across the world:
Ethiopia’s debo, where neighbors gather to help with farming tasks like plowing or harvesting, with everyone later sharing in food and celebration.
Mexico’s tequio, where communities contribute labor for shared projects such as building schools or repairing roads.
Trinidadian and Caribbean parang, where groups go house to house in December, pooling joy, music, and food so no household is left out of the season’s abundance.
Italy’s passata canning season, when families process tomatoes together into sauces that last the year.
Nordic and Caribbean salt-curing, used to stretch fish and meat across long winters.
Indonesia’s slametan, a communal feast marking life events where neighbors come together to share food and prayers.
India’s Diwali meals, where extended families and communities gather to prepare, share, and distribute food as an expression of light, generosity, and connection.
Each practice looks different, but the rhythm is the same: the work is heavy, so we carry it together. This is the same principle at the heart of kimjang and the power of collective effort — survival and belonging made possible through shared labor.
The Hidden Skills in Cultural Practices
What often goes unnoticed is that cultural and family practices sharpen the very “soft skills” a future-ready workforce demands. The World Economic Forum highlights critical thinking, problem solving, adaptability, and emotional intelligence among the most essential for the next decade. For first-gen and diverse professionals, these weren’t learned in boardrooms — they were practiced long before, in kitchens, classrooms, hospitals, and community spaces.
Here are six of the most valuable skills employers seek, illustrated through experiences that often shape first-gen lives:
Critical & Analytical Thinking — the ability to assess information, spot patterns, and make sound judgments.
Example: Comparing conflicting instructions on government forms or scholarship applications and figuring out what’s actually required — a direct training ground in analysis and discernment.
Creative Problem Solving — generating solutions when obstacles arise.
Example: When a parent can’t communicate with a landlord, improvising with gestures, translation apps, or borrowed community knowledge — resourcefulness under pressure that mirrors workplace innovation.
Systems Thinking — seeing how individual parts connect to the whole and anticipating ripple effects.
Example: Serving as translator at a hospital isn’t just about words. You connect symptoms to medical language, doctors’ instructions to your parent’s fears, and follow-up care to insurance paperwork. You’re mapping how communication, emotion, and logistics interlock — exactly the systems awareness organizations need in high-stakes environments.
Effective Decision-Making — choosing wisely under constraints of time, resources, and competing priorities.
Example: Deciding how to divide limited internet bandwidth at home between siblings during exam season — that’s real-time prioritization with high stakes.
Emotional Intelligence (EQ) — recognizing, interpreting, and responding to the emotions of self and others.
Example: Mediating a heated sibling argument, calming tempers while ensuring everyone feels heard, demonstrates the same conflict-resolution employers rely on in teams.
Collaboration & Communication — working with others toward shared goals while ensuring information flows clearly.
Example: Acting as the “bridge” in multigenerational households — interpreting grandparents’ stories, parents’ expectations, and siblings’ frustrations so everyone feels understood — a skillset employers recognize as team facilitation.
The Coaching Reframe
As first-gen professionals, it’s easy to downplay these experiences, to see them as family obligations rather than professional assets. But pause and ask yourself:
What family or cultural practices shaped how I collaborate today?
How did I learn to read a room, anticipate needs, or manage resources?
If I called those skills “leadership” instead of “helping out,” how would that change how I see myself?
How might I bring that same spirit of kimjang — of shared effort and renewal — into my workplace projects, mentoring, or team leadership?
The key isn’t to romanticize exhaustion. It’s to reframe — to see that these cultural practices don’t just drain us, they can also renew us. They connect us to identity, give meaning to our work, and remind us that leadership is most powerful when it lifts more than just ourselves.
Closing Reflection
When we honor practices like kimjang, debo, tequio, or parang, we remind ourselves that leadership doesn’t come only from boardrooms or job titles. It’s cultivated in kitchens, fields, and traditions that have sustained communities for centuries.
As first-gen professionals, our cultural heritage is not something we leave at the office door. Just as kimjang isn’t just about kimchi, our cultural practices aren’t just chores or memories. They are reservoirs of skill, resilience, and connection. By recognizing the strengths we’ve carried from them — and naming them in our professional life — we can show up with more clarity, belonging, and purpose.
Heritage is not separate from success. It’s the soil that helps it grow.
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