Taiwan Today

The year 2002 was a turning point for CTCI Corp., the largest integrated engineering and construction firm in Taiwan. Responsible for part of the construction of Taiwan's high-speed railway and fourth nuclear power plant, CTCI won bids for 10 big construction projects in China that year, bringing a huge increase in its workload. All of a sudden the company became short-staffed, desperately in need of engineers. Established in 1979, the company had been hiring blue-collar workers from Southeast Asia for a long time, but Taiwanese had always been employed for engineer positions. "The company had been thinking of hiring abroad for some time, but hesitated because we had little experience of hiring foreign white-collar workers and didn't know how reliable they were," says Ike Liao, CTCI's executive vice president. This time, however, CTCI had no choice.

Filling an Empty Pool

The local talent pool seemed to be otherwise focused or simply unqualified. "Taiwanese students tend to major in electronics and work in that sector," Liao says. "But we wanted workers who could do the job on the first day."

The company focused its attention on places like India, where experienced and affordable engineers are not hard to come by. "Many of them have worked in big international companies," says Richard Tu, who has been to India twice headhunting for CTCI through Indian human resources agencies. The Indian workers started to work at the company in 2004 and have proved to be worth the investment. According to Liao, the company originally planned to employ them for only six months, but many worked for more than a year for two main reasons. Firstly, the workload of the Chinese projects turned out to be much heavier than initially expected; and secondly, the company was very pleased with their performance.

Today about 1,034 engineers are working at CTCI headquarters in Taipei and its branch office in Kaohsiung; 31 of them are foreigners, mostly from India and the Philippines. "Their English is good," Liao says of the company's preference for engineers from these two countries. "They are professional and familiar with international standards."

The advantages of foreign workers have become more obvious as the company has started to move beyond Taiwan's borders and bid for international contracts. "If we want to develop, we can't be confined to Taiwan," says Liao. "We have to compete abroad and use international talent." Before 2000, revenues from overseas contracts accounted for less than 20 percent of the company's earnings; today that percentage has reached 70.

Professionalism and the Brand

However, Liao is not blind to the downside of the new recruitment policy. While foreign workers have a good command of English, they cannot speak Chinese and sometimes find it challenging to communicate with their Taiwanese colleagues. In addition, they are competitive in the global job market and so tend to shop around for optimal salaries. "In general, they have a weaker identification with the company than local workers," he says. "For example, sometimes we ask our workers to work overtime when there's a need. In these situations local workers work exceptionally hard, but their foreign counterparts carry on at the usual speed. We pay them a certain amount of money, and they just work for that amount of money."

These are minor complaints, however, because most of the time Liao is happy with the work of foreign workers. They might leave as soon as they find some other company in Singapore offering higher pay, but Liao finds that these globetrotting job seekers are quite serious about their reputation for professionalism in the international market. "They know it's important to look after branding and building their image," he says.

While foreign talent helps CTCI move beyond Taiwanese shores, white-collar workers coming to Taiwan do so with good reason. "CTCI is a reputable global company, so working here is a plus on my resume," says Jyoti Prakash Biswas, 34, an engineer from Calcutta, India, who had worked for multinational companies abroad before coming to Taiwan.

Biswas does not cite his salary, which is between NT$50,000 and NT$60,000 (US$1,524 and US$1,829), as the reason for his stay in Taiwan, and neither does Sunil Subhash Katwe, 32, another Indian now working in the company--at home their remuneration would be comparable. "Taiwan has good infrastructure and living standards. The comforts of the West also can be found here," says Katwe. He also finds it easy to work in Taiwan because of the comparatively accepting nature of Taiwanese society. "Originally I'd planned to emigrate to Canada. I worked in Calgary for three months, but found it hard to fit in, I often felt the distance between people," he says. "But it's easy to feel close to other people in Taiwan, just like in India."

For both men, Taipei's comparatively high living expenses are a major concern. Biswas is in Taiwan alone, leaving his wife and daughter back in Calcutta because tuition fees for international schools here are too expensive for him.

Having worked at CTCI for more than one and a half years, Katwe is thinking about his next career move before his contract ends at the end of this year. He might continue to work for the Taiwanese company or take his wife and his 3-year-old daughter to another location. "I'd love to show the world to my family," he says.

Regardless of Katwe's next step, CTCI will keep recruiting new blood from abroad. "The company thought of hiring overseas only when the workload demanded it, but we're going to do so systematically in the future and hire more foreigners as executives," says Liao. "It's time to prepare Taiwanese workers to accept foreigners as their bosses."

Prodigal Sons

While CTCI looks beyond Taiwan for talent, it is by no means coincidental that the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), a government-funded national organization for applied research in industrial technology, has made an annual event of recruiting tours to the United States since 2004. "Taiwan needs to become more creative, so we want people with different ideas and backgrounds, in order to come up with more new ideas," says Daniel King, a project manager in ITRI's human resources department.

An eight-day trip to Silicon Valley, San Diego, Boston and Chicago recruited more than 90 new staff members to ITRI that first year, most of them overseas Taiwanese. The North American Taiwanese Engineers' Association and other Taiwanese groups in the US have played a major role in providing ITRI with Taiwanese expatriates. "They made it known that ITRI was coming. Then we held a job fair, treated prospective candidates to dinner, gave them a presentation about ITRI and collected their resumes," says King, who went on the tour for the first time in 2006.

Few Taiwanese companies or organizations had traveled to the US to recruit talent before ITRI did so. "I think it's an effective strategy because I can talk to the recruiter face- to-face without having to fly to Taiwan," says Phil Chang, 39, who came back to Taiwan to work for ITRI last October after studying and working in the US for a total of 14 years. Attending the ITRI event last April in Silicon Valley led him to work as a senior researcher at the institute's Information and Communications Research Labs.

Established in 1973, ITRI did not employ special strategies for recruiting overseas talent until the early 2000s. Previously, over 100 overseas Taiwanese came home to work for them every year, but this number alarmingly halved four years ago, partly because fewer Taiwanese were studying abroad. "Overseas talent is important to ITRI because we're serious about interacting with the world," says Hwang Hsiu-chuan, deputy general director of the human resources department. For this reason, ITRI decided to find overseas employees itself as soon as current president Johnsee Lee took office in 2003. Last year it also contracted a major headhunting company in the US to search for talent.

Its own recruitment projects aside, ITRI makes use of the opportunities created by government agencies. It has been taking part in HiRecruit, a project started by the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) in 2002 to recruit high-technology talent abroad. The ministry has not only established a HiRecruit Web site as a virtual platform where overseas job seekers and Taiwanese recruiters can interact, but has also organized recruiting trips, headed by high-ranking officials like the vice minister of the MOEA, to America, Japan and India.

In addition to recruiting full-time workers from abroad, ITRI initiated an international internship program in 2005, which provides free lodging, a monthly salary and work experience in ITRI labs for at least two months, mostly in the summer. Related information is available on its Web site as well as at universities abroad to attract foreign students to apply for the 24 internships offered last year. "It helps us spread our reputation worldwide," King says. "Those who have experience with us may want to come back again as full-timers. Even if they don't, they can tell other people what it's like working here. It's hard to measure the concrete benefits of the program, but I think the benefits are there."

In the past three years ITRI has hired over 200 full-time professionals from abroad, from entry-level positions to top-tier management, and 90 percent of them have some kind of connection with Taiwan. Non-Taiwanese workers number over 60 in total, and most of them had either worked in Taiwan before coming to ITRI or moved to Taiwan because of their marriage with Taiwanese. The diversity of interns is greater, now half of them are non-Taiwanese students.

More Than Just the Money

"We do want non-Taiwanese professionals, but it's difficult to attract them to Taiwan. The main reason is the weak financial incentive," says King. A person with a master's degree fresh from Stanford University can earn US$8,000 a month in a US high-tech company, he says, but ITRI pays only NT$60,000 (US$1,875) or so. So why are American Taiwanese willing to give up well-paid jobs to return to Taiwan? "Many come back to Taiwan after making enough money in the States," says King. "Taiwan is their mother country after all."

That the US economy has been doing pretty well in recent years poses a challenge to ITRI's recruitment project. During his last trip there in 2006, King heard that most American hi-tech companies were hiring. When Americans find more job opportunities at home, they naturally stop thinking about going abroad to work. "Taiwan is not the only country recruiting international talent," King says. "There's global competition for people with special high-tech skills."

However, Taiwan does attract some foreigners. "Compared with Sweden, Taiwan is really a convenient place," says Han Olsson, an engineer from Goteborg, Sweden. "You can buy whatever you want at any time, and I learn new things every day at work." He has worked at ITRI's Intelligent Mobility Technology Division for six months and went there after studying in Taiwan as an exchange student and doing a 10-month internship at ITRI. Having learned Chinese for two years, Olsson is able to handle most everyday situations now, and when asked about the money, he says that it is offset by the much lower cost of living and tax rate. "So the standard of living in Taiwan is almost the same as that in Sweden."

Olsson thinks that as the West is trying to benefit from the boom in Asia, his experience working and living in Taiwan will be valuable. "No matter where I work in the future," he says, "I'll try to maintain a connection with this region."

Similarly, Phil Chang gave up his well-paid job in Silicon Valley and moved back to Taiwan because he believes the future belongs to Asia, mainly China and India. "It's difficult to see phenomenal growth in America now, but Asia is a place of opportunities," he says. "If you grab the opportunity at the right time, any short-term cost will be nothing in comparison to future gains."

So ITRI will keep doing the publicity work abroad and attracting more professionals like Olsson and Chang who look beyond the paychecks. On the other hand, starting last year it has also begun to turn to countries in addition to the US for non-Taiwanese talent, which explains why it made the trip to India organized by the MOEA last November. The result is that six doctoral candidates from India are coming to ITRI this year for a visit. Five of those invited are from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras located in Chennai, one of the top schools in India and one of three which ITRI visited on its recruiting trip.

Vietnam, Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries are being added to the recruiting list this year. "The financial incentive should be stronger there," says Hwang Hsiu-chuan. Another target is Japan, where ITRI plans to attract local retirees to whom the financial incentive should matter less. The goal is to increase the number of non-Taiwanese workers to 200 by 2008. As ITRI is diversifying its global talent pool, this should be a mission possible.

Write to Oscar Chung at oscar@mail.gio.gov.tw