Taiwan's talent crunch a boon for S-E Asia's workers

Island looking southwards for tertiary students, hoping to train them for roles in chip sector

- Yip Wai Yee

TAIPEI - When Vietnamese postgraduate student Le Tan Vinh was looking to study abroad for his master's degree, Taiwan was a nobrainer.

Besides being offered a full scholarship, the 28-year-old said he would benefit from exposure to cutting-edge semiconductor research and development.

"Taiwan is one of the few places that offer generous scholarships for Vietnamese students, and that's a very big factor for us," said Mr Vinh, who graduated with a master's degree in electrophysics from Taiwan's National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in 2021.

"Taiwan is also famous when it comes to semiconductors, so I decided it was the best choice," he told The Sunday Times.

He is now pursuing a PhD at the International College of Semiconductor Technology at the same university, and plans to find a job in the island's chip sector in the future.

Taiwan hopes to welcome more people like Mr Vinh as it steps up efforts to attract international students - especially those from South-east Asia - to make up for its shrinking university enrolment numbers amid a falling birth rate.

In 2023, Taiwan's total fertility rate was 0.865, among the world's lowest.

In particular, the island is looking southwards for prospective tertiary students in the hope that they could be trained to fill the shortage of high-tech talent in the critical semiconductor industry, where Taiwan is a leading producer, manufacturing over 90 per cent of the world's most advanced chips.

A 2023 report by Taiwan's largest job search platform, 104 Job Bank, said the average number of monthly job openings in the local chip sector in the second quarter of 2023 was 23,000.

This comes as the output of Taiwan's semiconductor industry is expected to reach NT$4.17 trillion (S$174 billion) in 2024, an increase of 13.6 per cent from the year before, amid advances in new technologies such as generative artificial intelligence, said Taiwan's Institute for Information Industry.