Malaysia’s global rank is number 20 out of 144 countries, which considered as a good result for the developing country. On the other hand we can observe that the countries where the company would like to expand to, demonstrate absolutely opposite from each other scores. Singapore holds second global rank, where Myanmar is on 134. It should be a clear sign that the countries have very different economic positions; therefore parent company should expect various challenges arising throughout the expansion. Furthermore approaches for solving these challenges will be differ depending on the country.
4
Score for the pillar of Health & Primary Education in Myanmar is very low. It can result in poor health of the employees, high level of absenteeism or sick leaves. At the same time the primary education can also be related to the level of productivity and ability to adapt to changes. In contrast, Singapore holds rank 2, which characterize Singaporean workforce as opposite of
Myanmar. Malaysia rank is 33, which portray good health of workforce and acceptance of innovative processes.
Countries with a high score for higher education and training, like Singapore provide a good quality of education to the majority of the workforce and constantly invest in the training of existing employees in order to enhance their skills and increase efficiency. On the other hand Myanmar holds one out of ten the lowest scores in the world, which indicates the scare of skilled labor in the country. It also confirms the prediction mentioned during the discussion the demographic variables earlier in Part 2.1. Malaysian rank is 46 suggests that there might be shortage of skilled labor to a certain extend.
Labor market efficiency describes the efficiency of the labor force, incentives and opportunities offered to the workers, which result in low “brain drain” effect and attraction of talents to the country. The trend continues, Singapore present high efficiency of labor market, whereas Myanmar remains low. Malaysia score is characterizing the country as attractive for the talents, yet there is a brain drain to more developed countries as it was confirmed by one of the recent researches by Salleh, et al. (2015). Hence, HR department have to consider the effective approach to incentives in Malaysia and Myanmar, as it can be one of the factor for improvement of the current position.
Furthermore, the Global Competitiveness research 2014-2015 (Schwaub, et al., 2014) highlighted the problematic factors related to the workforce and affecting the current economies, which are:
• Malaysia: Poor work ethic in national labor force
• Singapore: Restrictive labor regulations
• Myanmar: Inadequately educated workforce.
Parent-country HR shall prepare themselves for heavy investment into training and development of the employees in Myanmar, as there is a scare of skilled labor. At the same time, the laws and policies in Singapore might become the most problematic area while expanding to
Singapore. Hence the legal documents and policies shall be studied in details.
From the statistical data presented in this part of the research assisted the author in analyzing the overall picture of labor force in selected countries. The Malaysian company shall consider the significant differences of economical position and workforce in selected hosting counties.
Healthcare, education and training are recognized as major weaknesses in Myanmar, whereas it recognized as strengths of Singapore workforce. Hence, more expatriates from parent-country are required in order to train host-country national in Myanmar. Conversely in Singapore the need for training and development of local workforce is low. However attractive compensation packages should be ooffered in order to attract the skillful employees, as competition among MNCs within the country is high.