President Kim Il Sung visited an ordnance factory in Kunja-ri, Songchon County, South Phyongan Province early in 1951. Looking far into the future of the triumphant country, he advanced a unique policy on founding factory colleges for training native technicians.

According to the party's measures to massively set up colleges at big factories and enterprises as required by the developing reality, there appeared 23 factory colleges and seven branch colleges in the Juche 49 (1960)-Juche 50 (1961) academic year and the number of these colleges increased to more than 70 late in the 1970s and to over 100 in the 1980s, taking the country as a whole.

This led to the appearance of more than a hundred factory colleges, fisheries colleges and farm colleges. Hundreds of thousands of workers and farmers became engineers and assistant engineers while on the job. And hundreds of graduates emerged deputies to the Supreme People's Assembly and heroes.

Graduates and students of those colleges put forth hundreds of thousands of inventions and technical innovation proposals.

They played big roles in completion of UHP electric arc furnaces, the Juche iron production system, the mass-production of vinalon, a great event for the whole country, the gasification projects in Namhung and Hungnam and in the drive to put the country's industry on a CNC basis.

They hold an ever-increasing proportion in the technical and managerial staff of industrial establishments and farms. They play big roles in technological updating of the national economy, boosting production and in the drive to push back the frontiers of the latest science and technology.