More young Taiwanese go for working holidays

More young Taiwanese go for working holidays

More Taiwanese young people are heading overseas on "work holidays", enticed by the prospect of higher pay and foreign pastures.

Some 27,000 Taiwanese aged between 18 and 35 travelled to Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada, Britain, Germany, and South Korea last year on year-long stays combining work with travel. The number was 60 per cent higher than in 2011.

Mr Kao Yueh-sheng, co-founder of YEC International, an agency which plans trips for clients bound for Australia, said it had more than 600 customers last year, a 20 per cent increase over 2011.

"The demand for working holidays has been rising in the past two or three years," said Mr Kao. "The main reason is that salary levels in Taiwan are too low, just about one-third or one-quarter of those in Australia."

One can easily earn A$30,000 (S$35,000) for a year's work in Australia, he added.

So eager are some young people to venture abroad that they even go into debt to finance their trips. Last year, some 812 Taiwanese borrowed a total of NT$95 million (S$4 million) - both sets of figures nearly double those in 2011 - under a government-endorsed loan scheme.

Most, like Ms Joy Chen, got their money from saving every cent or borrowing from their families.

Ms Chen, 25, worked in five part-time jobs for nearly a year before flying to Australia in 2010 for a two-year stint, immediately after graduating from university with a degree in early childhood education.

"I've always wanted to go abroad to learn English. My mum was supportive - she said working holidays are one way ordinary people like us can see the world."

After studying English at a language school in Melbourne for two months, Ms Chen worked successively as a strawberry packer, a meat packer, and a waitress in Brisbane and Sydney. Between jobs, she holidayed in Tasmania, the Great Barrier Reef and the nearby island of Fiji.

She made her first NT$1 million, considered a milestone for young adults here, though she took home much less after deducting living and travel expenses. She regarded as more valuable the friendships she struck up.

"I made friends from Poland, Colombia and Japan, with whom I still keep in contact. The owners of the restaurant I worked at, a Hong Kong immigrant couple, visited me in Taiwan this year," she said.

The experience also helped her secure her first full-time job as a "study-abroad" consultant.

Helping young Taiwanese gain a broader world view is the main reason the government has been promoting work holidays, Foreign Minister David Lin has said. Since 2004, it has signed working holiday agreements with nine countries, most recently Ireland and Belgium.

Australia is the top choice as it does not limit the number of visas issued and offers an abundance of jobs, mainly in farms and factories. It also grants a one-year extension to Taiwanese who have worked at least three months at agricultural jobs, which are shunned by Australians.

As most of the jobs entail manual work, it has led some to wonder whether young Taiwanese are being turned into a cheap source of labour for some of these foreign countries, and tarnishing Taiwan's reputation in the process. This, especially after a magazine wrote about the experience of an economics graduate from the island's prestigious National Tsing Hua University.

The headline - "How a Tsing Hua graduate became an Australian butcher".

However, the stir the article created has only increased interest in work holidays.

The foreign ministry is on the verge of signing a working-holiday pact with France.

Books by working-holiday veterans are aplenty in the stores. One best-seller, The Australia Survival Guide, is into its 14th print run, just three years after it was first published.

seokhwai@sph.com.sg


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