As soon as the graduation ceremonies come to an end, newly turned out university graduates have to look for jobs, pounding the keyboards and working their mobile phones. Taiwan’s unemployment rate last year was 4.39 percent, with the jobless rate for new graduates aged 20 to 24 hitting a high of 12.71 percent.
That means new graduates account for much of the overall level of unemployment. This could be because new graduates are waiting to find their ideal job or are preparing to undertake national professional examinations and many do not have immediate financial pressure placed on them by their families after graduation, given the nation’s low birth rate. In economic terms, this is known as frictional unemployment.
Given the high unemployment rate for new graduates, Premier Sean Chen (陳冲) has highlighted that several programs have been launched to create more job opportunities and increase resource allocation to fresh graduates including youth business start-up loan schemes and a farm rental program. The youth business start-up loan aims to assist and provide training to young people to help them start their own business in their home town, which could also potentially fill up more local job vacancies. The farm rental initiative, a Council of Agriculture project, helps young people who are interested in farming and agriculture to rent farms from landowners and give them support.
Meanwhile, surveys by the recruitment Web site 1111 Job Bank found that companies are less likely to recruit fresh graduates and this has gradually increased over time. Most jobs are largely open only to candidates with a certain level of experience or type of higher education degree.
Another recruitment agency, 104 Job Bank, has said that graduates from technical colleges are more likely to obtain job interviews than graduates from other institutions. The main reason is technology college students get specialist skills training which involves taking tests or programs for professional licenses and certificates during their school years.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office has also announced that it will relax regulations on Taiwanese students and residents who want to work in China, which could cause a China-driven brain drain.
Given these challenges, the government should review its labor policy by taking into consideration the nation’s low birth rate and its aging population and launch reforms to upgrade industries. Taiwanese entrepreneurs, for their part, should consider building up a more comprehensive supply chain and bring to an end some of their costly and inefficient outsourcing to create more local job opportunities. Furthermore, in-school training and internship programs are needed to strengthen the abilities of young people to meet employers’ expectations, thus encouraging the latter to hire new graduates.
Cooperation between industry and universities could be another way to help young people enter the labor market, but the government needs to have relevant policies in place to protect these inexperienced youngsters from being exploited.
Gary Chen is a public relations officer and international affairs specialist at the Taiwan Institute of Economic Research.
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past