Malaysian Quantity Surveying Graduates Work Performance from the Perspectives of Singaporean Employers

Brain drain is a global phenomenon that describes talent lost when highly-skilled workers exit the country for any potential push-pull factors. This is deleterious to the developmental progress from sending countries which is generally from small and poor nations, aside from battling poverty, on top of that they still struggle with brain lost that brings about a chain effect of workforce imbalances which later causes more economy and societal problems. Meanwhile, Malaysia being one of the sending countries in Asia, yet again it faces issue of incapable of retaining local talent as well as attracting foreign talent. While Malaysia aims to escape the second-world chasm and join the league of high-income nations by 2025 but one of the deterrents seems to be talent mobility when many Malaysians are seen emigrating to neighbouring country, Singapore at a worrying rate, has hosted the majority of highly skilled Malaysians. With more professional intention to exit in the country in which typically influenced by monetary purpose, hence Malaysia should not turn a blind eye to the occurrence of brain drain. This phenomenon is also happening among Malaysian graduates including quantity surveying (QS) graduates. A study was conducted to identify the reasons why Singaporean employers employ Malaysian QS graduates as well as to identify the level of satisfaction of Singaporean employers towards the work performance of Malaysian QS graduates. Questionnaires had been distributed to QS consultancy firms and general building (GB) contracting firm’s director in Singapore, collected and analysed by descriptive analysis. The findings revealed the top three reasons for Singapore employers to employ Malaysian QS graduates were labour shortage in Singapore, culture similarities between Malaysian and Singaporean, and good adaptability of Malaysian QS graduates in Singapore working environment. As for the working performance of Malaysian QS graduates, six categories of working performance appraisal criteria were being evaluated which were knowledge of works, capabilities on works, management skills, working attitudes, personal skills and other job-related skills. It was found that the overall mean for these working performance criteria were generally distributed to “satisfied†. This result showed that the level of satisfaction of Singapore employers towards working performance of Malaysian QS graduates is high. Among these six categories of working performance criteria, Singapore employers were most satisfied with the “working attitudes†of Malaysian QS graduates. Meanwhile “management skills†of Malaysian QS graduates was evaluated as the least satisfied working performance criteria.