Getting Ideas?

This article was written by Oscar Chung and published by the Taiwan Review on April 1, 2007. It features the Industrial Technology Research Institute and the CTCI Corp. in Taiwan, which have been going overseas to search for engineers and people with ideas.

The Industrial Technology Research Institute is a government-funded national organization for applied research in industrial technology. Since 2004, it has made an annual event of recruiting tours to the United States. In that first year, an eight-day trip to the Silicon Valley, San Diego, Boston and Chicago recruited more than 90 new staff members, most of them overseas Taiwanese. The North American Taiwanese Engineers' Association and other Taiwanese groups in the United States have played a major role in providing the institute with Taiwanese expatriates.

The institute was established in 1973. It did not employ special strategies for recruiting overseas talent until the early 2000s, when fewer Taiwanese were studying abroad and therefore even fewer came home to work. In 2003, the institute even contracted a major headhunting company in the United States to search for talent.

Meanwhile, the institute has been taking part in HiRecruit, a project launched by the Ministry of Economic Affairs in 2002 to recruit high-technology talent abroad. Part of the project is a series of recruiting trips to America, Japan and India. Another part is a web site where overseas job seekers and Taiwanese recruiters can interact. Most importantly, in 2005, the institute initiated an international internship program that provides free lodging, a monthly salary and work experience in its labs for at least two months, mostly in summer. In 2006, a total of 24 internships were offered.

In the past three years the institute has hired more than 200 full-time foreign professionals, and 90 percent of then have some kind of connection with Taiwan. The number of non-Taiwanese workers in the institute is more than 60, and most of them have either worked in Taiwan before or moved to Taiwan because of their marriage to Taiwanese people. The diversity of interns is also greater, with half of them now being non-Taiwanese students.

Taiwan is attractive for many people with special high-tech skills because nowadays the West is trying to benefit from the boom in Asia. These people believe that the future belongs to Asia, mainly China and India. While phenomenal growth rarely happens in today's America, Asia is widely considered to be a place of opportunities. Since 2006, the institute has begun to turn to other countries for non-Taiwanese talent, including Japan, India, Vietnam, Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries. The goal is to increase the number of non-Taiwanese workers in the institute to 200 by 2008.

On the other hand, the CTCI Corp. is the largest integrated engineering and construction firm in Taiwan. Established in 1979, the company is responsible for part of the construction of Taiwan's high-speed railway and fourth nuclear power plant. In 2002, it also won bids for 10 big construction projects in China. Throughout the years, the company has been hiring blue-collar workers from Southeast Asia. Now, it has huge demands for foreign white-collar workers, engineers in particular.

CTCI Corp. focused its attention on places like India, where experienced and affordable engineers are relatively easy to come by. The Indian workers started to work at the company in 2004 and have proved to be worth the investment. Today, among the company's 1,034 engineers, 31 are foreigners, mostly from India and the Philippines. These are professionals and familiar with international standards, which makes them a valuable asset. More importantly, they are able to handle international contracts. Revenues from overseas contracts now account for approximately 70 percent of the company's earnings.

According to the company, the disadvantage of hiring foreign workers is that they cannot speak Chinese and often have trouble communicating to Taiwanese colleagues. Meanwhile, because they are generally competitive in the global job market, they tend to shop around for optimal salaries. This results in their relatively weak identification with a given company, when compared to local workers. Nonetheless, foreign workers are said to be quite serious about their reputation for professionalism in the international market. They know it is important to look after branding and building their image.

From the viewpoint of foreign workers, Taiwan has good infrastructure and living standards. Not only can the comforts of the West be found here, but the comparatively accepting nature of the Taiwanese people also makes everyday life much easier to deal with.