The great tech manhunt: East Asia’s billion-dollar race for ASEAN talent
Get the Tech newsletter
Daily tech — startups, AI labs, chips, the launches that shape the next decade. Free.
- Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry forecasts a shortfall of up to 790,000 IT professionals by 2030, while South Korea's Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry projects a deficit of at least 580,000 advanced-technology workers over the five years ending 2030 (analysis released December 2025)
- Taiwan's National Development Council estimates a shortfall of up to 480,000 workers by 2030 across IT, engineering, and semiconductor roles — with the island's semiconductor sector alone opening 34,000 new jobs in 2024 at firms including TSMC, Nvidia, Micron, and MediaTek
- Japan in 2024 proposed training 100,000 highly skilled digital professionals from ASEAN over five years under a government-to-government framework, and Fukuoka in November 2023 became the country's first municipality to offer expedited visas for IT talent — a scheme since expanded to semiconductor workers and replicated by Kumamoto, Miyagi, Kitakyushu, and Sapporo
- Kitakyushu has concluded agreements with Vietnamese recruitment agencies to train 360 highly skilled Vietnamese IT graduates by 2029 for local firms in software, application development, and smart-city infrastructure, while Aichi and Shiga prefectures run direct career pipelines with Hanoi University of Science and Technology
- South Korea blends specialised STEM scholarships with guaranteed post-graduation employment and a path-to-residency visa that shortens the permanent-residency eligibility period, while Taiwan's INTENSE programme offers scholarships in exchange for a post-graduation work commitment in Taiwan
- Vietnam is now home to about 40,000 students in Taiwan — the island's largest international student cohort — and is the primary source country for the Japan-Vietnam Cooperation Forum on High-Value-Added Industries in High-Tech, GX, and Semiconductor Industries, which launched in April 2025
- Despite soaring youth unemployment in Vietnam and Indonesia, skills mismatches mean many domestic tech vacancies go unfilled — forcing those countries to simultaneously court returning talent with retention incentives while watching their brightest head north
Why it matters: The competition exposes a sharp asymmetry: East Asia is buying talent ASEAN cannot fully absorb due to skills mismatches, draining local pools at a moment when Vietnam and Indonesia struggle with youth unemployment and unfilled tech jobs. The three East Asian economies project nearly 1.85 million missing workers by 2030, meaning this is not a marginal hiring trend but a structural dependency on Southeast Asian graduates.
