Less than 50 percent of enterprises are willing to hire Chinese university graduates because Taiwanese students outperform their Chinese counterparts in expertise, teamwork, work ethic and creativity, an online survey showed yesterday.
Conducted by online manpower agency 104 Job Bank and the Chinese-language Global View Monthly (遠見) magazine, the survey came after a heated debate on the government’s proposed cross-strait trade pact on Sunday.
The manpower agency’s public relations manager, Max Fang (方光瑋), said that even though an economic agreement with China would open a new era of human resources exchanges across the Taiwan Strait, Taiwanese talent would not be replaced by Chinese talent.
“Taiwanese university graduates are still more competitive than Chinese graduates,” Fang told a media briefing.
Vicky Chen (陳瑋芝), head of human resources at Standard Chartered Bank Taiwan Ltd, said Taiwan had a role as an “Asian talent pool,” providing China and other regional markets with human resources.
The survey, which polled 1,127 employers nationwide between March 8 and March 19, found, however, that Chinese students were more eloquent, ambitious and globally conscious than their Taiwanese counterparts.
“Despite the fact that Taiwanese graduates have better expertise than their Chinese peers, Chinese students will soon outperform Taiwanese on this front,” Chen said.
A separate survey, which was conducted by 104 Job Bank and Standard Chartered during the same period of time, showed that National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) was the most competitive university, edging out last year’s top-placed National Taiwan University (NTU).
“Employers polled felt that NCKU graduates were more active, trainable and stable in the workplace, when compared with NTU students,” Fang said.
The survey found that more than 50 percent of employers valued attitude most highly when recruiting, followed by willingness to learn, trainability and expertise.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
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New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last