Competition For Educated Talent All Over The World

by Yuhua Zhang, GEI Associate

In modern world, educated people play a more significant role in a countries’ economic growth. The competition for the educated around the world has become more and more intense. Consider that education flows from developed countries to developing ones.

Countries all over the world have been taking various of measures and policies to attract the educated talent. Talent strategic competition has been raised to the level of national strategy.

United States takes advantage of high amount of world‘s top universities to appeal more and more brilliant international students.

Based on the report from white house website on November, 2014, President Obama proposed several executive actions to reduce barriers and simplify immigrant procedures for high-skilled talents who can effectively grow US economy. One of the most important proposals is to expand and extend the use of the existing Optional Practical Training (OPT) program and require stronger ties between OPT students and their colleges and universities following graduation for foreign students studying science, technology, mathematics and some other technological majors at US universities.

According to the Global Talent Report: The Outlook to 2015 published by Economist Intelligence Unit, US is the top in GTI with overwhelming superiority. One of the main sources of the advantage is exactly the large amount of world’s top universities, the high quality educational resources, extensive research opportunities and free studying atmosphere appeal students all over the world, especially from China and India. In the new century, more and more short-term college student visas are issued by US government, and most of foreign students are willing to work in US after graduation because of the flowing labor market and the performance based promotion system in US. Furthermore, US government adjusts policies timely to extend expiry date of internship visa for graduates in highly demand industries such as science and technology.

Germany opens labor market for targeted industries trying to attract senior professional international talents.

In recent several years, the thriving economy and job market in Germany causes further shortage of German professional talents. In 2013, Germany opens their job markets for some targeted industries which include medical nursing, mechanical electronic,etc to attract more foreign senior professional workers, especially in non-EU countries. Based on the statistics, Germany accepted about 430 thousand immigrants in 2013, three quarter of which are from other EU countries. The statistic is the largest in past twenty years and is estimated to keep growing in 2014 and 2015.

However, although Germany has reduced barriers of labor market, only a few non-EU technological talents are attracted to work in Germany. The main reason seems that there are series of complicated policy procedures,extra fees and relevant qualification authentication for German enterprises to handle to hire foreign employees. Therefore, German government should take some more measures to simplify such procedures to construct a more convenient path for talents introduction.

Japan reduces immigrant barriers, and promotes education internationalization in the meanwhile.

As Japan exists high percentage of aging population, talent strategy has more closely connection with their economic development. In current several years, there are two main strategies taken by Japanese government.

On the one hand, since 2013, Japan has taken several effective measures to promote education system and cultivate more international talents. For example, Japanese colleges continuously rise the percentage of English based teaching and hire more foreign professors; Japanese government proposes job distribution policy for qualified foreign graduates. On the other hand, on June 2014, Japanese government reduced the required residence year for immigrant application from 5 years to 3 years. Moreover, Japanese government also reduced immigrant barriers for international talents’ family members. Based on their nice social welfare, the policy effectively adds the attractions to foreign talents.

Furthermore, in recent several years, a lot of Japanese large enterprises have improved their working conditions for foreign employees by optimizing their remuneration system.

However, due to the closed and conservative society, some foreign talents express that it is quite hard to integrate into Japanese mainstream social circle and still expect to work in their hometown.

India creates “scientific talent pool“, and pays more attention to returnee talents.

Compared with developed countries mentioned above, India, as a developing country with large population, put great emphasis of their strategic talent competition on returnees.

Since 1960s, Indian government has invested in establishing “scientific talent pool” to attract Indian returned students. Since 2005, Indian government started to issue citizenship papers to Indians overseas, and on September 30, 2014, Indian government announced that the Indian citizenship cards they issued are lifetime valid, all of which aims to provide convenience for Indian talents overseas to return, working, starting business and investing in India.