Nov 12, 2004
They come for money but stay for the life
By Bryan Lee
ENGINEER Raghavan Surianarayanan's salary shot up by 10 times when
he left Chennai to take up a job in Singapore.
Married with one child and another on the way, he was earning about
$400 a month after seven years in his first job, in an Indian
engineering consultancy.
The prospect of better pay made him consider working abroad, then
in 1993 he spotted a newspaper advertisement for a job in
Singapore, and applied.
'The cost of living may be lower in India, but the savings
potential was good in Singapore,' he said.
He got the job as a service engineer in a marine engineering
company here. Despite his wife being pregnant with their second
child, he took up the offer and moved. His family joined him a year
later.
Now, 11 years on, Singapore is home. At 41, he is a project manager
in Japanese industrial automation giant Yokogawa Electric.
His company, which has an engineering force of about 400 now,
announced a huge expansion earlier this year, with plans to add
2,000 engineers over the next six years in the fields of software,
chemicals and electronics.
It expects to pay at least US$100 million (S$166 million) for the
new talent needed to establish its first software development
centre outside Japan and strengthen its team of consultants for
industrial automation projects worldwide.
Like other companies recruiting for the expanding manufacturing and
research and development (R&D) sectors, Yokogawa will employ
Singaporeans.
But it will also look for talent from India, China and the West. In
R&D, bringing together diverse talent is highly valued.
Since Mr Surianarayanan's arrival, many more foreigners have come -
some to take up jobs like he did, others to study first and then
work.
Mr George Cui, 33, from Dalian in China, and Miss Deepthi Cannot
distribute vertically Prabhakar, 22, from Bangalore in India,
made their way here on Singapore
government scholarships and education grants.Mr Cui
did his master's degree at the National University of Singapore and
now heads a division of more than 40 staff at Yokogawa.
'I wanted to get the best education before going to work. While I
would have been able to do my master's in China, I wanted to try
something different, to go to a different country.
'Singapore has a good environment to associate and communicate with
people of different cultures,' he said.
Miss Deepthi graduated with a bachelor's degree from Nanyang
Technological University last year and now helps to design mobile
phone software for Motorola's R&D centre.
She left home in 1999. 'People where I come from have the notion
that once you get to Singapore, it is easier to get to other
developed countries. There are many multinational companies in
Singapore, so there are many good career opportunities here.'
Indeed, from operating assembly lines which merely needed lots of
cheap unskilled workers, companies are now engaged in much
higher-level activities, such as R&D and project consulting, as
well as regional or even global headquarter functions.
'There is a shift towards high value manufacturing. This creates
jobs at all levels: from researchers and engineering professionals
to production workers,' says Economic Development Board resource
development division director Lee Ying Adams.
But what is also clear, says Mrs Adams, is the growing skills
profile of the workforce. Whereas in 1994 just 46 per cent of
manufacturing jobs required minimal Institute of Technical
Education qualifications, that proportion swelled to 76 per cent
last year.
Dr Tony Lee, who heads Yokogawa's operations here and in the
region, said: 'Singapore's manufacturing sector has been moving up
the value chain. Naturally, the need for engineers has
grown.'
While he would like to employ Singaporeans as far as possible, he
said there just is not enough local talent with the right skills
and experience.
Motorola Singapore president Jeffery Tan said: 'Singapore's tight
labour market in the higher-end of the spectrum of engineering
skills creates opportunity for foreigners with relevant
expertise.'
About 40 per cent of Motorola's 700-strong engineering team is made
up of non-Singaporeans.
Beyond just making the numbers, companies say workplace diversity
is another reason for recruiting abroad.
This, they say, is good for innovation and is a natural result of
the increasingly regional and global perspective of manufacturers
in Singapore.
Indeed, for Taiwan-based MediaTek, the world's No. 6 chip designer,
the decision to set up a $50 million R&D centre here was
spurred in part by Singapore's 'good living environment', said
chairman Tsai Ming Kai in September.
The Republic's cosmopolitan setting, he said, would help the firm
recruit from the best talent in the world.
Its Ayer Rajah facility, set up in June, will focus on developing
chips for wireless communication and digital consumer products, and
needs 300 engineers. Aside from Singaporeans, it expects to bring
in talent from China, India, Europe and the United States.
Also announcing plans to recruit highly-skilled staff in a big way
this year was Dutch electronics giant Philips, which announced in
August that it needed 200 more people for its product development
centre in Toa Payoh.
It wanted product managers, design engineers and software engineers
with at least four years' experience, and was prepared to pay
between $4,000 and $10,000 a month.
While many will come for the jobs and the attraction of living and
working away from home, some end up staying long enough to become
permanent residents or even citizens.
Mr Surianarayanan, who became a citizen last year, counts the
reasons why: good government, well-run public institutions, racial
harmony and a generally clean and safe living environment.
He left home for a better-paying job, but found professional
satisfaction and a good place to raise his daughters, aged 11 and
13, as well.
They are benefiting from the good education system here and are
being exposed to people from other cultures.
China-born Mr Cui, who recently rejected an offer of a well-paying
job in Shanghai, became a Singaporean citizen last year.
Married with a four-year-old son, he said: 'This is a place where I
can have more exposure and develop my career.
'But money is not the only issue. We have a good life in
Singapore.'