Insideview
Michael Page Taiwan Salary Benchmark 2020 report launch
The annual report, produced by Michael Page in association with the ECCT, was released at a Premium Event lunch. A summary of the report’s highlights was presented at the lunch by the guest speakers. After the lunch the report was released to the media at a press conference.
The event attracted a large audience of HR personnel and respresentatives from a wild cross-section of industries
The report provides an overview of market and employment trends in 2019 across major industry sectors and features insights into employment conditions, key employment skills in demand, sector trends and salary benchmarks in Taiwan.
Data for the report was derived from 8,000 data points in the group’s proprietary data and network in Taiwan, which includes job advertisements and placements from July 2018 to June 2019.
In his presentation, Tibbatts gave and overview of industry trends and some highlights of the report while Claire Wu gave some in-depth details of trends in specific industry sectors.
Tibbatts noted that Taiwan was the best performing country in the region in the Michael Page group, this year, with a 30% growth in job placements from the previous year.
The report notes that Taiwan will experience fierce competition for talent in the key progress areas of digital, engineering, technology and data in 2020.
In addition, as the market experiences a net brain drain to mainland China, Taiwan will continue to witness a candidate-driven hiring landscape.
According to Michael Page’s job applicant confidence index, published in the report, 63% of job applicants in Taiwan are inclined to work overseas in 2020. The report also shows that professionals in Taiwan are very confident. 70% of them believe they will take less than three months to find a new job, 94% foresee themselves having better career progression in 2020 and 81% are positive about the job market.
According to the report, while Taiwan is not immune to the adverse international conditions from a trade and market volatility perspective, there are several hiring bright spots. Technology, in particular looks promising given buoyancy for software development, online gaming start-ups, app development and other developer-driven sectors.
This is affirmed by big brands in technology increasing their investments in Taiwan. Google announced plans to double its office space in 2020, while Amazon and Microsoft have confirmed plans to expand their research and development centres in Taiwan. According to Tibbatts, this indicates great confidence in Taiwan’s R&D ability and that these investments are likely to spur investments from other companies.
Other findings from the report reveal exponential growth of digitalisation across industries. With increased digital transformation efforts, the financial services sector is expected to decrease their hiring in back office positions as the functions are either replaced by artificial intelligence (AI) or outsourced.
Advancements in healthcare are also driven by the increasing adoption of home-based sensors, robotics and AI-enabled home health monitoring platforms. This will boost hiring needs in the future which combine both healthcare and technology expertise.
According to Claire Wu, the group is also seeing positive signs from Taiwan’s traditionally strong sectors, such as engineering, while semiconductors, renewable energy as well as healthcare & life sciences continue to look promising. She also noted encouraging signs of manufacturing activity returning to Taiwan while hiring managers in financial services sound confident, particularly as Taiwan remains a relatively high-skill and low-cost business location.
The year ahead will see continued advancement of AI, Internet of Things and 5G wireless communications. Therefore all experts in these fields will be sought after by companies.
According to the report, candidates skilled in technology can command an average 15% salary increase when switching jobs within similar industries.
At the press conference, Mark Tibbatts (speaking), looked on by Claire Wu, Director of Michael Page Taiwan (right)
