The quiet war on skilled workers

For over two hundred years, countries competed and fought over natural resources, but today they compete and fight over skilled workers. A quiet global war for skilled workers is already underway but few people would notice.

In the Knowledge Age, the value of a company or the wealth of a country will change from natural resources to human capital. Even today, many people cannot comprehend the “invisible value” of human capital but if you look at the economic index of developed countries, you will see that knowledge industry has occupied a central part of their economies. For example, for over hundred years, Coca Cola was the symbol of the U.S wealth as it is sold all over the world but today, Apple and Google are the new representatives of U.S Wealth. Not long ago, U.S. billionaires were Rockefellers, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and J.P Morgan but today they are Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, and Marc Zuckerberg.

During any transition, there are countries leaders who choose to stay idle, and wait because they do not know what to do because the new thing is difficult to understand. In the past, Chinese Emperor decided to stay idle, not changing then was humiliated by foreigners who invaded and exploited China. Japanese Emperor quickly adopted the new thing and modernized its country by improve its education system to catch up with western countries and grew to be a powerful nation. Today history is repeating itself but this time it happens in Europe as some countries decided to stay idle and wait for better time then have their own economic meltdown as happens in Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy etc... In the transition from industrial to knowledge age, there are countries who know how to seize this opportunities by investing in technology education to develop the next generation of leaders and skilled workers. For example, India, once a major exporter of low cost unskilled workers, has evolved into a center of highly-skilled Information Technology (IT) expertise. In less than twenty years, it has changed from $250 million dollars in exporting unskilled workers to over $100 Billion dollars in exporting IT products and created several million new jobs for its economy.

Today, most developed countries are facing shortages of specific IT skills, and need to “import” more IT workers to meet these requirements. A recent study, by the World Economic Forum in 2012 had indicated that the US will need to add 26 million workers to its workforce by 2030 to sustain its economic growth, while Western Europe will need to add 46 million. The question is where do they find these skilled workers? The solution is having an “open immigration” laws to get highly skilled workers from other countries to come and work. The U.S uses the H1B visa as a way of opening doors to highly-skilled people; UK and European countries develop special work visa that facilitate the flow of skilled workers to their countries. Singapore has special policies which attract highly skilled workers to work there; Israel opens its doors to Russian and European migrants to work in its high-tech area, etc. A well known economist declared: From now on the world is not going to war to capture natural resources, but will go to a different war to capture “skilled workers” and this global war is already underway. In this knowledge age, countries that have more skilled workers will dominate as technology innovation is the new factor of economy power.”

Even with open immigration, it is impossible to bring in millions of workers and their families into a country without confronting local people who fear of losing jobs to new immigrants. Another option is to set up development and research centers in various countries to get skilled workers wherever they are and connecting them through communication links and collaborative work platforms to create a “global” team. The new rule of the knowledge industry is to “open work center where skilled workers are” and that is why Microsoft, Google, IBM, Oracle, Facebook etc. are opening development centers all over the world to attract more skilled workers.

For many years, two countries that have significant number of unskilled workers were China and India but as the world is transitioning to the knowledge age both are experiencing a shortage of skilled workers in technology areas. The World Economic Forum study indicated that India will NOT have enough skilled workers to help improve its economy as most of its skilled workers already left the country for jobs somewhere else. The “brain drain” symptom has robbed India of its future. China will have severe problems in the future as it does not have enough middle level managers to manage its factories, and construction due to its obsessed on low skilled labors in manufacturing rather than develop its own managers. China has graduated several million graduates each year, but questions are being raised about the quality of their education and whether they have the necessary skills for its growing industry. The study of the World Economy Forum had concluded that the "learning by memorization" of the Chinese education system means its graduates often lack the practical experiences and soft-skills required in the modern business world. Graduates from this educational system rely mostly on remember facts but have no idea how to apply them to solve problems. Compare with India, China's graduates also lack of foreign language skills (Especially spoken English) so their graduates may not be able to compete in the near future. As China's rapid economic growth with many foreign companies setting up offices and factories, its education has not be able to produce a quality middle level managers who can manage these factories efficiently so they have to bring in foreign managers. At the same time, China's population was aging rapidly which add another heavy burden to its economy while the number of young people in their 20s and 40s was shrinking due to the strict "one child" laws which will prevent any future economy improvement.

Currently both of these countries are worrying about losing their best and brightest skilled workers to other western countries and begin to create barriers to prevent the “brain drain” phenomena but so far they are not so effective.

Sources

  • Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University

You may like