Workplace integration in Australia - the experience of professional Vietnamese skilled migrants
Creators: name: Tran, Thi Tuyet
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 350503
subject: Human resources management

description: This qualitative research focuses on why skilled migrants (SMs) originating from Vietnam were successful in their quest to gain a foothold – eventually – in Australia’s challenging labour market.  This is a research area where scant academic studies pertaining to skilled migrants have been undertaken. 

This study employs theoretical models based on the critical realism paradigm and the intelligent careers framework. These models informed the structure for the semi-structured in-depth interviews with fifty SMs from Vietnam and twelve Australian recruitment staff. The key research outcomes are based on the strategies the migrant informants adopted to successfully enter the labour market through an analysis of the obstacles presented by contemporary recruitment practices. 

There are numerous barriers mentioned prominently in the literature that SMs generally face when applying for jobs in Australia. Such barriers may include discrimination, a lack of faith in applicants’ qualifications and experience, mistrust of referees, and doubts about the applicants’ human and social capital, as examples of a broader array of issues that are outlined extensively in this study. 
The findings of this study showed that Vietnamese SMs also experienced other more subtle but hard-to-overcome challenges from cultural interference, such as how to develop job applications and ‘sell themselves’ so that Australian recruiters would be responsive. The findings also reveal several institutional barriers, such as discrimination based on work experience in a less developed country like Vietnam. The popular organisational requirement of ‘no permanent resident – no job offer’ in the Australian professional labour market was also verified as a factor in this research. 

The Vietnamese SMs employed various strategies to overcome these multiple barriers, including accepting small, menial jobs in family businesses, undertaking casual, short-term assignments, registering to do volunteer or internship work, or even self-promoting in different channels (e.g.  Gumtree social media, knocking on the target organisation’s door) and accept any jobs on offer, all with the same aim: to accumulate relevant local work experience. This may also explain why the claims of SMs’ skills under-utilisation are so prominent in the extant migrant literature. 

Nonetheless, the findings of this study indicate that accepting underemployment was only a temporary solution or a pathway these Vietnamese SMs opted for in response to Australian recruiters' refusal to accept their overseas work experience. Once these SMs accumulated sufficient ‘relevant’ work experience, they would find ways to obtain jobs aligned with their skills, qualifications and expectations.  
This study calls for a more refined research framework that goes beyond the different types of career capital (i.e., human and social capital) that SMs possess, to consider various cultural and institutional factors when investigating international skilled migrant mobility and talent attraction. Insights provided by the research participants in this study will hopefully help Australian policymakers develop more supportive policies and services to assist SMs in their transition to employment in Australia. It also contributes to the human resource and organisational literature with a refined understanding and new knowledge to help organisations develop more robust plans to embrace inclusion in recruitment, and to strengthen their competitive advantages from this unique human resource.