News South Asia

Nations fight global war for talent

Muhammad Hazim left Malaysia for Coventry and the promise of an accountancy career. Now his home nation wants him back.

The fast growing southeast Asian country needs him – and thousands like him – as it seeks to address a “brain drain”, or emigration of skilled professionals, that threatens its ability to fulfil its economic and development goals.

Mr Hazim, 21, is in the first year of an accountancy and finance degree at the University of Warwick. His experience in the UK, he says, has been “nothing less than spectacular – from the chance to volunteer to teach maths to primary school children to acting in a play at Warwick Arts Centre”. He has even improved his survival skills – “I finally had to learn to cook as I missed Malaysian food so much,” he says.

To lure him back, Malaysia is going to great lengths and with good reason. A 2011 World Bank study estimated the Malaysian diaspora had quadrupled in three decades – for every 10 skilled Malaysians, one elects to leave the country – double the world average.

Malaysia is not alone. Last year, the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India estimated that Indians studying abroad cost the country as much as $17bn a year in lost revenue. The African brain drain is also acute.

The issue is not confined to emerging nations. Between 1996 and 2011, more than 23,000 scientists left Germany. As a result, German scientists constitute the largest group of foreign researchers in places including the US, the Netherlands and Switzerland. In February, Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, was warned that she should implement programmes to entice more of them home.

As for the UK, figures last year from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) revealed that 1.3m university-educated Britons are now overseas – higher than for any other developed country.

Even the US is not immune to the drift of the highly educated abroad. There is a certain irony in this, as the term “brain drain” is said to have been coined by the UK’s Royal Society to describe the movement of technologists and scientists from postwar Europe to North America.

Mr Hazim, meanwhile, was one of 4,000 UK Malaysian students who attended a careers fair in London this March run by the United Kingdom and Eire (Ireland) Council of Malaysian Students and Graduan, a careers resource for Malaysian graduates. It is supported by TalentCorp, a Malaysian government-established body to help meet the country’s talent needs, and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW).

For Johan Merican, TalentCorp chief executive, Malaysia has to “take employers to students” to meet its skills requirements.

“You can have an international career in Malaysia – graduates can obtain ICAEW’s international chartered accountancy qualification back home,” he says. A tax break also allows returning Malaysian experts to pay 15 per cent income tax for five years rather than the top rate of 25 per cent, he says.

Once qualified, Mr Hazim will indeed return home. “First and foremost, I wish to get a job I will enjoy,” he says. “My father told me: ‘With passion Hazim, one will go far’ and I really believe this ... I’m looking for a clear career path with ample growth prospects.”