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.'