Business week, in a December article entitled “China Business Schools Hit Their Stride“, explains that Chinese business schools increasingly match the Western quality of education. It’s been an arduous journey, since the first business programmes in 1991, but results are now starting to show.

Although much has been done, the demand for talent is still high in China – 20,000 MBA students graduate each year, whereas 75,000 graduates are needed. Truly, the market cries out for business professionals, with international companies and Chinese employers (having operations abroad) being the neediest.

In terms of quality, schools in China succeed in two ways: 1) capture the domestic talent that once preferred to study abroad and 2) attract Western talent that is interested in knowing more about the world’s second largest economy. With this approach, allied to the networking possibilities offered by the programmes (40% international students, 60% Chinese students), China will keep talent inflowing.

Seems like the next smart thing to do is take an MBA in China…

Asia’s booming economy has created a special need for natives with Western experience
By Fred Cohn in Universum Quarterly 4/2010

The boom in Asia’s economy has created a corresponding growth in its job market. Companies are hiring not just in established business centres like Hong Kong and Singapore, but in the second- and third-tier cities that are now flourishing throughout the area. But whilst top professionals, even those without native language and cultural skills, have traditionally been able to flourish in the continent’s more cosmopolitan cities, employers in Asia now increasingly need – and demand – candidates who demonstrate cultural fluency. The situation has put a special premium on native Asians who have developed international cultural skills. Because of this, Asian expatriates – natives who are now studying or working abroad – are particularly desirable subgroup.

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By Christopher Van Mossevelde.

Due to a critical shortage of experienced staff, attrition is an “every-day hazard for companies operating in East Asia”, reports the FT.

In her article, “Aggressive hiring keeps the talent moving”, Elaine Moore, gives the example of RBS Coutts, which lost one third of its staff to its rival BSI.

According to her, the war for talent is not only affecting private banking and big corporations, but also small businesses where employees are known to switch jobs for minimal salary increases.

Michal Kalinowski, UNIVERSUM’s CEO, was quoted saying “In 2010, the first Chinese company entered Universum’s World’s Most Attractive Employers list (a global index of Employer attractiveness). An interesting sign of things to come is that for the first time ever there is a Chinese company in the top 50 – Lenovo at 44 among engineers”.

The report featured UNIVERSUM’s data on East Asian Students’ Career expectations and the ideal employers in Hong Kong, Singapore, China and Japan.

Quoting various experts in the field, however, the article’s main arguments were: 1) salary increases do not guarantee retention and 2) employers should assess cultural & motivational fit between candidate and the organisation prior to employment.

As Chinese companies continue to dominate the indexes of employer attractiveness (rankings here), it is with some dismay that I notice only a few western companies getting ready to address the challenge of talent attraction in the medium term.

Furthermore, looking at the business plans of some top western-world companies, a major growth is expected to come from BRIC; but how these companies are expecting to deliver in such big markets remains partially a mystery. What I know is that attracting talent will be a major challenge and without human capital, how are the companies going to deliver on such different markets?

Long gone are the days where being an international company represented a competitive advantage in the talent market. Nowadays, Asian talent has career expectations that they perceive only achievable in local companies. If western companies want to achieve success in Asia, the time to start building their talent pipeline is… right… now!

While reading the FT.com, I came across an interesting article written by Glori Ye: Concern over China’s ‘job-hoppers’. According to this article, in the US, the average working life for a fund manager at the same company is 4.8 to 4.9 years, while in China it’s only 1.68 years. These challenging HR conditions are one of the reasons for the poor results in the funds’ performance and have also forced fund managing companies to have two fund managers per fund – one “old” or existing manager plus a “new” fund manager.

For the employer branding arena, this is a clear sign that talent retention is a strategic issue: not only industries that fail to retain their top talent incur in higher HR costs, but also their performance is weaker. Definitely interesting to think: how much one’s company losing / winning due to bad / good retention strategies?