آموزش کارکنان و سرمایه انسانی در تایوان

Although globalization, liberalization and the development of the network economy have undoubtedly enhanced the competitiveness of the Taiwanese economy, with the island's citizens benefiting enormously from lower prices on a wide range of products, the downside has been the obvious increase in unemployment, and the accompanying instability of employment amongst the island's remaining workforce. Policies adopted by the Taiwanese government to tackle this and improve human capital in the human resources development (HRD) process on the island, give rise to many questions, however, such as whether employee training programs can really provide Taiwan's workforce with sustainable employability and whether such programs can effectively reduce the probability of unemployment. They also raise the questions of whether employee training programs can help unemployed workers to shorten their unemployment period, thus reducing the overall number of structurally-unemployed workers, and whether these programs can ultimately lead to increases in overall income levels for successful trainees. These are the questions to be investigated in this paper.

Although globalization, liberalization and the development of the network economy have undoubtedly enhanced the competitiveness of the Taiwanese economy, with the island's citizens benefiting enormously from lower prices on a wide range of products, the downside has been the obvious increase in unemployment, and the accompanying instability of employment amongst the island's remaining workforce. Prior to 1996, the unemployment rate in Taiwan had remained below 2 per cent; however, since then, it has risen continuously, and indeed, by 2003, had reached a historical high of 5.3 per cent What is of particular concern, is that not only has the rate of unemployment climbed consistently during this period, but amongst the total unemployed population, the share of long-term unemployment has also been rising dramatically, reaching a record high of 32 per cent by 2003 (DGBAS, 2003). During 2003, several measures were implemented by the Taiwanese government in an attempt to tackle the current problems, such as the NT$ 20 billion (US$ 600 million) ‘Public Service Employment Expansion Act’, the NT$ 50 billion (US$ 1.5 billion) Public Construction for Employment Enhancement Act’ and the NT$ 11 billion (US$ 325 million) Employability Enhancement Program’ (EEP) Whilst the purpose of the first two measures was to generate more jobs, and thereby reduce the overall unemployment rate, the purpose of the EEP was to encourage the setting up of employee training and retraining programs by private sector employers. The overall goal of the EEP was to upgrade the skills of one and a half million workers over the subsequent three years and thus to increase the overall employability and employment stability of the workforce (Lee & Hsin, 2003). The current EEP is a pilot program which, if successful, will be expanded by the government to become one of the leading measures for increasing the flexibility and employability of Taiwan's workforce. Such policies give rise to many questions, however, such as whether employee training programs can really provide Taiwan's workforce with sustainable employability and whether such programs can effectively reduce the probability of unemployment They also-raise the questions of whether employee training programs can help unemployed workers to shorten their unemployment period, thus reducing the overall number of structurally-unemployed workers, and whether these programs can ultimately lead to increases in overall income levels for successful trainees. These are the questions to be investigated in this paper. The foregoing questions are important because if employee training programs in the human resources development (HRD) process do prove to be effective in improving overall employability, the government will be able to rely more on these programs and less on legislation to provide Taiwan's workforce with the job security that it so desperately needs. Whilst legislative measures aimed at job security can provide protection for male workers between the ages of 25 and 55, such measures nevertheless represent a two-edged sword, because the overall knock-on effect is to reduce employment stability for younger and older workers alike, as well as for women. There is clearly sufficient scope for the government to expand employee training programs in Taiwan because it currently spends only 0.03 per cent of the island's GDP on employee training. This stands in stark contrast to many of the European nations which spend substantially higher amounts of their GDP on employee training; examples include Denmark, which spends 0.84 per cent of its GDP, Sweden, spending 0.31 per cent, Germany, at 0.34 per cent, and the Netherlands, which spends 0.30 per cent of its GDP on such programs (Martin, 1998). Following on from this introduction, the remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we briefly review the current literature on employee training, concluding with a statement of this study's hypotheses. Section 3 provides a brief overview of current employee training in Taiwan, the main purpose being to provide the reader with some background on the current trend in employee training. Section 4 presents details of the data sample and a summary of the empirical results, followed, in Section 5, by the conclusions drawn from this study.

As more and more countries join the network economy, workers in these countries will begin to benefit more from the network economy as consumers; however, as employees, they are being put under increasing pressure by the uncertainty and the increasing instability of the employment environment brought about by the incessant march towards the internationalization and globalization of their economies. Clearly, a difficult task for all of the affected governments in the human resources development process will be to find ways of coping with the associated problems; however, strengthening legislation aimed at the protection of labor is not an effective solution because such a policy is self-defeating, since flexibility is an essential prerequisite in the highly competitive international market. Whilst the US government permits maximum flexibility and counts on the ‘chimney effect’ to take care of workers at the lower levels, some of the European countries such as Demark and the Netherlands have adopted a ‘Flexsecurity’ policy. One of the elements of flexsecurity is the provision of ample opportunities for the workforce to receive employee training and to constantly upgrade these workers’ overall skills and knowledge. This is clearly a very effective way of encouraging and allowing employees to gain the ability to maintain a level of flexibility with lifelong employability. The government in Taiwan is in fact thinking along the same lines; however, whilst an investigation into the effectiveness of the existing employee training programs does confirm that these programs are effective in improving the ability of trainees, it does not similarly confirm that these programs will necessarily improve the likelihood of securing greater wage increases or higher reemployment rates. There have been numerous empirical studies carried out in other countries, which have produced similar unexpected results and the scholars involved have invariably tried to explain these unexpected results as either ‘lock-in’ and ‘post-program’ effects. Clearly, however, further studies will be necessary in order to assess these effects and to correct the problem of ‘selection bias’ which our data in the present study has not permitted us to do, before we can gain a really accurate assessment of the impacts of employee training programs.