Taiwan’s job market outlook gets top marks due to island’s effective control of coronavirus

The outlook for Taiwan’s labour market is one of the brightest in the world, given the island’s highly effective efforts to control the coronavirus pandemic, a top labour placement agency has said.

International staffing agency ManpowerGroup this month gave Taiwan the best employment outlook of 43 markets around the world. Its net employment outlook for the fourth quarter grew 11 percentage points from the current quarter, ManpowerGroup said, based on interviews with 1,094 employers. That means 23 per cent of employers intend to add staffing from October through December.

“Compared with other emerging economies in the region, Taiwan’s labour market is relatively resilient due to the low degree of pandemic shock,” said Ma Tieying, an economist with DBS Bank in Singapore. She expects job growth to pick up in the first quarter of 2021.

“Some South and Southeast Asian economies, which suffered serious shock from the pandemic, are also facing the serious pressure of retrenchment and structural changes in their labour markets,” Ma said. “Taiwan’s loss of jobs in the last several months was modest and largely cyclical. Therefore, its labour market is relatively better positioned to recover.”

Still, challenges to finding a good job remain, as the experience of recent graduate Chuang Yan of Taipei illustrates.

The 25-year-old advertising and publishing specialist has received only four replies to résumés she began sending potential employers in June. One resulted in an interview. She got the replies as companies cut staff and froze hiring due to weak consumer demand and government-ordered business closures to stop the spread of Covid-19.

But she is still looking for work, ideally at a magazine.