This chapter aims to provide an overall motivation for conducting this study. In the first section, the researcher will discuss the background of the study, followed by motivation, problem statement, research purposes and questions that guided the investigation. Other sections examine the significance and delimitations of the study as well as the definition of key terms.
Background of the Study
The interest to research on this topic came while the researcher was on an internship at National Development Council (NDC), one of the government agencies for development in Taiwan. As part of routine duties, the researcher had to proofread some of the policies related to manpower planning, supply and demand. While proofreading the policy for shaping an internationally competitive environment for immigration and employment, the researcher began to wonder what makes it necessary for the policy to be competitive in retaining talented or professional foreign workers in Taiwan.
From a sample of literature, the researcher realized that the need for a competitive policy was made necessary by an increasing importance of professional employees in many industrialized and fast developing economies of the world (Brown, Hesketh & Williams, 2004; Choudaha & Wit, 2014; Von Krogh, Ichijo & Nonaka, 2000). This significance led to the current “global war for talent” or “battle for brains” between developed nations (Michaels, Handfield-Jones, & Axelrod, 2001; Beechler & Woodward, 2009). This war is further exacerbated by an uneven distribution and high mobility of skilled workers across and in-between world economies (Straubhaar, 2000).
Research has also increased the significance of professional foreign talent by linking innovation with culturally diverse professional employees in companies (Caruso & Wit, 2015). Von Krogh, Ichijo and Nonaka (2000) corroborated that innovation in our current economies which are driven by and are largely dependent upon the expertise and positive attitudes of employees who come from different cultural backgrounds in enterprises.
It is the abovementioned significance and global war for foreign talent which compel governments and enterprises all over the world to adopted different strategies to attract professional foreigners into their territories. These strategies include the legislation of friendly immigration policies towards foreign professional workers as a way of attracting and retaining
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them. In addition, many governments including the Taiwanese government, have now decided to attract foreign students to their local universities and retain them as potential future foreign talent after graduation. It is within this premise that we need to view Taiwan’s integrated National Human Resource Development (NHRD). We also need to see this policy as a decorated labor market policy package of influencing international graduates from local universities to choose to work in the country after graduation (www.ndc.gov.tw/en).
However, the main argument of this thesis is that, it is not an easy task to attract and retain foreign graduates based on only liberal labor market policies. This is the case because foreign graduates are in demand all over the world and thus they have global job opportunities. These job opportunities give them a wide choice set to choose to work for an employer either based on good salaries or on their individualistic or personal factors.Higgins et al., (2008) defined choice as the person’s intentional selection in a choice sets. In a study of why international students from Taiwan and Indonesia do not choose to study in Australia, Mazzarol, Savery and Kemp, (1996) discovered that a student's choice of overseas study was influenced by their personal factors and alternative characteristics. In line with this reasoning, this investigation assumes that international students’ choice of working in Taiwan after graduation is influenced by their personal factors, university experiences and Taiwan’s labor market in comparison to their home country’s labor market.
It is also an undeniable fact that the availability of multiple workplace destinations for foreign graduates all over the world force employers to be employers of choice in order to attract and retain them. Employers of choice are able to cream the best talent from their countries’ local universities. But reaching the status of a globally appealing employer of choice is a demanding task, as it calls for the creation of attractive and globally competitive working environments. It also requires governments to construct attractive national infrastructures and to provide efficient and convenient social services. It also pushes enterprises to adorn their workplaces with enticing working conditions and attractive financial rewards. The Taiwan NHRD action program was designed with a sole purpose of exerting a positive influence on international students from local universities to make a choice of working here after graduation.
Taiwan NHRD action program is also one of the most proactive strategies that aim to increase the local undersupply of professional workers in the country. This undersupply is caused
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by a low birth rate and the “brain drain” effect caused by mainland China’s talent magnet labor market (www.channelnewsasia.com). It is anticipated that the NHRD action program will make a great contribution to Taiwan’s capacity to attract foreign workers, after eliminating the two years’
work experience entrance restriction required from foreign graduates. This elimination gives Taiwan a competitive advantage over and above countries like Singapore, who still abide by this rule (Lee, 2010; Ng, 2011).
As much as Taiwan’s NHRD action program has a great potential and is one of the most robust and powerful steps in attracting foreign talent, but the researchers believe that there are other necessary strategies that the government should implement to retain a sufficient amount of internationally competitive foreign graduates. These strategies can be identified only by conducting research on the personal factors, university experiences and labor market factors that influences’ international students’ choice of working in Taiwan after graduation. This kind of information can culminate into an integrated model that can help the Taiwanese government and other economic sectors to retain international students to work in the country after graduation.
Retention of foreign graduates from local universities can go a long way in supplementing the projected and continuous undersupply of the local working population in Taiwan (www.ndc.gov.tw/en). According to the preceding source, Taiwan’s manpower supply of the working-age population (aged 15-64) will decrease by about 100,000 per year in the near future, and the nation’s aging demographic structure reached a high turning point in 2012. What makes matters even worse is that, there is an undersupply of graduates from the country’s local universities. This demographic dilemma is shocking in nature, and it shows that the government must adopt more proactive actions to address this situation before it reaches a crisis stage.
In connection with the above-mentioned dilemma, we must also see foreign graduates from Taiwan’s local universities as an ideal asset to work for the country, mainly because they are not only equipped with essential professional knowledge and skills, but also with an understanding of the societies of both Taiwan and their nations of origin. The NHRD program also points out that some of these graduates might have fallen in love with the people and country during their years of study (www.ndc.gov.tw/en), and thus they need not to first undergo the adaptation process before being productive in their respective places of work in Taiwan.
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Problem Statement
Funk and Walenkamp (2013) transmitted that factors for attracting and retaining international graduates in host countries are “understudied”. Even the few studies on this topic are written by policy-makers who are mainly driven by economic and familial factors. These factors are most relevant to general migrants and have limited applicability to international students.
Moreover, many studies of this nature have been conducted either in the American or European context (Choudaha & Wit, 2014; Funk & Walenkamp, 2013; Mosneaga & Winther, 2013). Few of this studies have been conducted in the Asian or African context.
In practice, there is an uneven distribution of knowledge workers in world economies that are currently in a quick transition to knowledge and innovation-based economies (Lee, 2002). This unequal distribution is made worse by a constant decline of the working population and low birth rates in developed countries (http://www.ndc.gov.tw/en). It is against this background of an “aging society, projected labor market shortages and increased global competition for brains in the globalized knowledge economy,” (Sykes, 2013, p. 4) that this study seeks to find strategies for retaining more and more international graduates in Taiwan, so that the country can win the global war for talent.
Significance of the Study
This study aims to make a contribution to scholarship by adding more literature on the understudied factors that influence the immigration and retention of international graduates in host countries. It will also provide more insights into effective strategies for retaining aspiring foreign graduates who are a potential future foreign talent for Taiwan. This study also developed an integrated research model that integrates the influence of personal factors, university experiences and labor market on international students’ choice of working in Taiwan after graduation.
In practice, Funk and Walenkamp (2013) discovered that a large section of knowledge workers in foreign economies first immigrated to their host countries as international students and ended up working and living there as immigrants. This discovery implies that one of the strategies for winning the current demand for foreign talent is through the retention of foreign graduates (Malecki & Ewers, 2007). Foreign talent also boosts the competitiveness advantage and innovation of enterprises and nations (Hendry, 1995; Malecki & Ewers, 2007). This advantages that come
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hand in glove with foreign graduates pushes many governments, such as the Taiwanese government to design integrated NHRD action program to aggressively attract and retain international graduates in the country. Another significance of this study is to investigate aspiring foreign graduate’s awareness of Taiwan’s NHRD action program for encouraging them to work in the country after graduation.
The researchers believe that the investigation of international students’ awareness of the NHRD action program will contribute a lot in retaining them in the country after completing their studies. The investigators also hope that the research will go a long way in assisting Taiwan’s government efforts to be an employer of choice. At the same time, this research will assist the government of Taiwan and other stakeholders to design policies for retaining internationally talented graduates’ from the point of view of aspiring foreign graduates whom the government aims to retain after graduation. By so doing, the government will avoid the mistake that is usually committed by many governments all over the world by formulating policies using a top-down approach. In most cases, top-down policies ignore opinions, preferences, and interests of the relevant populace (Goldfarb & Henrekson, 2003). This analysis highlights another purpose of this paper which is to help the government of Taiwan to revisit the NHRD action program redesign it from a bottom-up perspective or from the worldview of aspiring foreign graduates.
Research Purposes
Based on the research background and motivation, the main research purposes of this study were to:
Provide a descriptive overview of the factors influencing international students’ choice of working in Taiwan after graduation
Discover the interrelationships among personal factors (PF), university experiences (UE), labor market (LM) and international students’ choice of working in Taiwan after graduation (CWT).
Develop an integrated model of factors influencing international students’ choice of working in Taiwan after graduation.
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Research Questions
Drawing insight from the research purposes derived from the motivations and background of the study, the following research questions were formulated:
1. What influence do personal factors have on international students’ choice of working in Taiwan after graduation?
2. Do personal factors have an influence on foreign students’ university experiences in Taiwan?
3. Do university experiences influence international students’ choice of working in Taiwan after graduation?
4. What influence do personal factors exert on international students’ perception of Taiwan’s labor market?
5. Does Taiwan’s labor market influence foreign students’ choice of working in Taiwan after completing their studies?
6. Do Taiwan’s labor market and university experiences mediate the influence of personal factors on international students’ choice of working in Taiwan after graduation?
Delimitations of the Study
In order to manage the horizon of the study, it is necessary to delineate some boundaries.
The first delimitation of this study focuses on international students in Taiwan universities.
Moreover, because this is “an ex-ante study”, it will collect data only from international students in Taiwan before they make their choice to work in the country after graduation (Musumba, 2007).
Delimiting the study to Taiwan universities means that the results of this study will be nationally restraint. Therefore, it should be generalized to another national context with caution. Also, taking into consideration that it is beyond the capacity of this research to solicit responses from each and every international student in Taiwan, the convenient sampling procedure will be adopted to conduct the research survey. The use of the convenient sampling method also implies that the results of the study will not be a perfect representation of all international students in Taiwan, and thus they should be generalized with some consideration to the total population of international students in Taiwan.
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Definition of Terms
In this section, theoretical and operational definitions of essential terms will be provided so that it can help the reader to understand the study better. The provision of operational definitions is made necessary by the need to show how the variables should be understood and interpreted.
While general or dictionary and other writers’ definitions will help in the provision of a general idea of the concepts. Below are the theoretical and operational definitions of the four main variables of the study and these are Taiwan’s sociopolitical environment, international students’
choice, university experiences, and career expectations:
Personal Factors
Theoretical Definition: Individualistic perceptions, beliefs, attitudes and motivation to comply to opinions of referent others to perform a reasoned action (Ajzen & Fishbein,1980; Kruanak &
Ruangkanjanases, 2014).
Operational Definition: Personal factors are measured by a total of 10 items which are; career perceptions (CP), family ties (FT) and students’ cross-cultural adaptation process (SAP) which were adapted from Kruanak and Ruangkanjanases (2014) study.
University Experiences
Theoretical Definition: University experiences means “experiencing everything that university life has to offer” (Wilcox, Winn & Fyvie‐Gauld, 2005, p.713).
Operational Definition: University experiences were measured by academic satisfaction (AS), student support (SS) and students’ satisfaction with their universities (SU). There were 13 items that measured these three dimensions of university experiences and they were adapted from the 2015 national Australian Universities research survey report.
Labor Market Factors
Theoretical Definition: A labor market is a national or international workplace, where workers find paying jobs and employers find willing workers to work in exchange for wages (Business Dictionary, 2012).
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Operational Definition: Taiwan’s labor market was measured by job opportunities (LB1, LB2), government policies (LB3) job environment (LB4) and salary (LB5). There were 5 items that were adapted from Mazzarol, Savery and Kemp (1996) to measure this factor.
International Students’ Choice of Working in Taiwan
Theoretical Definition: Higgins et al., (2008) defined choice as the person’s continued construction of self-identity by making selections in a choice set. The choice set implies that choice is a discrete variable, as it always comes with at least two or more options.
Operational Definition: International Students’ choice of working in Taiwan was measured by a single item (CWT) adapted from Kruanak and Ruangkanjanases (2014) to condition international students to choose either “definitely yes” or “definitely not” as an indication of the presence or absence of an intention to work in Taiwan after graduation.
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