A qualitative study on the phenomenon of brain drain amongst youth in Malaysia

Cheong, Jin Wei (2020) A qualitative study on the phenomenon of brain drain amongst youth in Malaysia. Final Year Project, UTAR.

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Abstract

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. 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. As many past studies in regards with brain drain were discussed in quantitative mass result, but an in-depth study on this matter is however only scarcely available. Thus, qualitative research method will be applied in this study in order to fulfil the limitation of previous papers, at the same time, to improve or extend the existing push-pull theories using Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Theory of reasoned action to justify the result. The fundamental purpose of this paper remains at this core focus which is exploring the phenomenon of brain drain, while the focus group belongs to graduates due to their growing interest in outbound prospects. Through them, a study of migration intention will be acquired in this paper using thematic analysis method.

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