A new entrant into society this year, Zhu Rui-xiang never could have imagined that someone like him, armed with an MBA degree from National Taiwan University, would not even get a single interview last year.

Starting in his first year of graduate school, Zhu accumulated internship experience at top-line companies like Shopee and IBM. Dreaming of a career in internet technology, he focused his job search on Southeast Asian e-commerce giants and unicorns, sending resumes out to 10 companies in a flurry, only to be told in the first round that new overseas hires had been frozen due to tightened visa policies across different countries in response to the pandemic.

(Source: Chien-Tong Wang)

Interview Lined Up, Openings Closed

Coming face to face with a withering employment market since the onset of the pandemic has been this graduating class’s unique fate. Last year, many of Zhu’s NTU classmates entered the final round of interviews with foreign companies, only for the companies to suddenly shut down all job openings.

This year, after finally greeting the lifting of lockdowns across Europe and North America with great anticipation, Taiwan experienced its own outbreak, causing the rapid freezing of the domestic employment market.

According to statistics for June from 104 Job Bank, there were around 387,000 full-time jobs available designated “open to new graduates,” representing a decline of 14 percent since worsening pandemic conditions in April, as 60,000 entry-level jobs vanished into thin air. And hospitality and retail industry job openings shrunk a further 20 percent.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic, this generation grew up in an age of fear and uncertainty.

Last year, TIME magazine published an exposé on US college graduates in 2020, noting that the “pandemic generation” belongs to Generation Z (broadly defined as the cohort born between 1995 and 2009), whose formative experiences include climate disasters, terrorist attacks, and school shootings.

Born Into Hardship, They’re Not Another Lost Generation

For Taiwan’s Covid-19 generation, the keywords describing their formative years include: low salaries, economic stagnation, and natural and man-made disasters.

The majority of this year’s graduating college class was born in 1999. On September 21 of that year Taiwan was hit with a devastating earthquake; the SARS outbreak took place when they were four, and was followed by Typhoon Morakot and the global financial crisis. And in their graduation year they encountered Covid-19, the pandemic of the century. 

This period also coincided with an era of long-term wage stagnation in Taiwan.

The Internet bubble burst in 2000, and starting in 2003 Taiwan entered a prolonged 16-year period of negative wage growth. For the past 20 years, Taiwan’s middle- and lower-class wages and assets stagnated and shrunk as the wealth gap continued to expand with every disaster.

Just at the juncture of graduation, the pandemic hit. Would it become a fatal blow, turning them into a lost generation?

The situation is not necessarily that pessimistic.

Being born into hardship helps cultivate resilience. 

This year’s “Covid graduates” possess various resilient qualities that separate them from previous generations. Existential crises can temper a generation’s character.

A survey of Generation Z by renowned global consulting company, Kantar Consulting, noted that phlegmatic economic growth, resource scarcity, and a volatile environment caused them to cultivate the three core values of “vigilance, self-reliance, and openness.”

The report suggested that members of Generation Z are often “aware that they must be shrewder, and plan strategically for the future.”

Covid Generation: Pragmatic Dreaming

CommonWealth interviewed several dozen members of this year’s graduating class from various different academic departments, discovering that the Covid generation is much stronger than previously imagined. Having endured numerous disasters while growing up, and witnessing the widening wealth gap, they have cultivated sensitivity towards social equity, are more resilient and pragmatic, and are capable of making use of resources to plan ahead.

Liu Jia-xiu, a graduating senior in culinary arts at TransWorld University in Yunlin County, was initially given an offer at a buffet restaurant chain at which she had previously interned, and was set to report to work in August.

However, with the pandemic outbreak the company informed her that her reporting date had been delayed. Not wanting to just stay at home, she started working part-time at a gas station in late June, a job completely unrelated to the profession for which she was trained. Still, she thought “first take care of securing some income,” and once the pandemic is over the food industry will bounce back.

They are more vigilant, and more flexible.

NTU business school graduate Zhu Rui-xiang, having encountered obstacles to his overseas job search and alerted to changes in the environment, immediately reacted flexibly, placing his focus back on Taiwan and focusing on open positions at overseas Internet tech companies in Taiwan. His strategy was to find work opportunities that could help take him abroad in the future.

After that change of direction he found a job as a management trainee in Taiwan with a Singapore-based gaming giant, with the opportunity to be assigned overseas in the future. 

Making arrangements in advance is an instinct they have honed in uncertain times.

Professor Lee Chien-hung of the Department of Labor and Human Resources at Chinese Culture University relates that, despite the current freeze of the employment market, the current class of graduates is making “advance arrangements” in their search for employment. Ministry of Labor statistics for the past five years indicate that more than 30 percent of graduating students start their job searches in February and March, so many of them dodged the brunt of the mid-May Covid outbreak.

Observing generational injustice from a small age has fostered in them a passionate character, as well as idealism.

(Source: Chien-Tong Wang)

As a young girl growing up, Lin Yong-yu, a member of this year’s graduating class at Mackay Junior College of Medicine, Nursing, and Management, often accompanied her mother on her rounds at the hospital, becoming accustomed to the lack of respect according to nursing staff. And now she has also ventured upon the same road. Lin, 20 years old, has it all figured out: “I will aim towards becoming a professional nurse, with an eye toward entering the public realm in the future to help improve the status of nursing staff in society.”

Wage skid stopped, a new age of prosperity waits

In truth, they could be the generation with the best luck, as Taiwan has already climbed out of the worst of it and entered a new era of prosperity.

Various figures indicate that Taiwan has come out of 16 years of negative salary growth, as tangible wages in 2020 surpassed 2003 levels.

Taiwan’s economic growth is accelerating in line with changes in the international situation. The Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics estimates that, despite the local outbreak this year, Taiwan can still expect economic growth to “surpass five percent.”

Consequently, Peng Bo reckons that Taiwan’s economy is currently in the most robust time since 1989, and is formally entering a period of prosperity.

After 20 years of economic stagnation, Taiwan now faces a turnaround. How to cover this group of graduates and ensure the turnaround are key issues currently facing the country.

(Source: Chien-Tong Wang)

The short-term challenge is that this year’s graduates continue to come under pressure. Lin Zong-hong stresses that going forward close attention must be paid to whether efforts to contain the pandemic yield results over the next quarter, and whether the economic turnaround can ease unemployment among youths.

If that is not the case, the government must come up with a stimulus program for the younger generation “to ensure that those young people that fell to the secondary market are supported,” he added.

Inequitable generational distribution; more investment in youths called for

Professor Lee Chien-hung notes that the unemployment rate among young people actually dropped during the first wave of the pandemic last year. In addition to the rapid rebound of the economy in the second half of the year, the government’s youth employment incentives came into play, encouraging young people to find work so that they can avoid sitting idle at home.

(Source: Chien-Tong Wang)

The issue over the mid- and long-term is inequitable generational distribution, as young people are not completely out of the woods. “Now is an important time to increase the intensity of investment in the younger generation,” relates Lin Zong-hong. Taiwan’s wealth is currently concentrated in baby boomers born in the 1940s and ‘50s, and the government should give thought to driving them to inject the elixir of capital into the younger generation.

For Taiwan to truly advance towards new prosperity it must overcome challenges including climate change, energy sustainability, an aging population and low birth rate, as well as industrial transformation. The only solution is to give the new generation greater support, and to let them put their creativity and ingenuity to work.

“This pandemic has proven that Taiwanese society is more resilient than we could’ve imagined,” remarks Lin Zong-hong.

The pandemic cannot kill the Covid generation. On the contrary, they will only become stronger.

---

Have you read?

♦ Taiwan’s Bilingual Education Needs Critical Thinking
♦ Singapore’s Education Reforms: Learning Is not a Competition

Translated by David Toman
Uploaded by Penny Chiang