International Students Facing Hurdles to Work in Host Countries

Every year thousands of students, mainly from the underdeveloped nations go aboard in developed countries like New Zealand, Australia, United Kingdom, and Canada to complete their higher education and to find better career opportunities after graduation.

Nearly every country in this list want to retain highly skilled graduates, but rules and regulations for the skilled employee differ due to different national policies.

Policymakers know how beneficial it will be for the economy, but different political views and public orientation toward foreign workers make it difficult to execute post-work rights effectively.

International Student Employability report equated the post-work-study rights among different countries and showed common interests and the tensions present in those countries. The report concluded New Zealand and Canada to be the most favorable and flexible in terms of policies for post-study work rights.

Rank	In Study Work	Post Study Work	Minimum Study	PhD	Masters	Bachelor
New Zealand	Yes	1 to 3 years	1 year	3 years	3 years	3 years
Canada	Yes	3 years	2 years	3 years	3 years	3 years
Australia	Yes	2 to 4 years	2 years	4 years	2 years	2 years
Germany	Yes	1.5 year	n/a	1.5 year	1.5 year	1.5 year
United States	Yes	1* year	1 year	1 year	1 year	1 year
Netherlands	Yes	1 year	1 year	1 year	1 year	1 year
Ireland	Yes	Half year to 2 years	2 year	2 years	2 years	Half to full year
Sweden	Yes	Half year	1 year	Half year	Half year	Half year
United Kingdom	Yes	3 months to full year	1 year	3 months	3 months to 6 months	1 year

European countries receive the most international students, so they have increased the number of work hours from 10 to 15 hours per week to restrain students and researchers from outside EU, aside from that, they also allow nine-month duration for the new graduates to find a job or to start their own business.

Every country wants to have the best talent possible present in its labor market. So, they have adopted different techniques to achieve that, they have provided attractive post-work rights and benefits. It can also inversely impact the number of jobs available for natives, which is a distressing sign for locals.

A survey concluded that majority of international students mostly STEM graduates (60 to 80 percent of them) want to work in the country after graduation, and that is a huge number of the students ready to create an unequal distribution of labor in the country. It is avoided by incentivizing the foreign graduates to work in regional cities rather than metropolitan areas leaving some labor gap in larger cities.

Countries like Canada adopted to regional retention strategy while Australia and New Zealand offer bonus points in skilled migration to incentivize study and work in the regional areas than metropolitan areas. But still, the reality is far away then what students want, and only one in four can pursue a long-term career in the host OECD countries.

Some countries like Denmark and the United Kingdom see retaining skilled individuals as a loss. In an already saturated market of skilled labor, there are a lot of less supportive remarks from the public on this issue too.