Countries worldwide are rethinking how they rely on international students and global talent, with transnational education (TNE) partnerships emerging as a key strategy.
TNE partnerships foster long-term alliances, tailored to each region’s specific talent requirements and economic goals, thereby accumulating, importing, and distributing expertise where it is needed most. TNE helps countries to design workforce pipelines and strengthen their position in the global race for talent.
While every region is using TNE differently, three themes stand out:
Scaling expertise through targeted partnerships
Across Southeast Asia, countries such as Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia are prioritising TNE as a tool for rapidly growing in-country skillsets. Their partnerships with institutions in Singapore, Japan, and Australia focus on strengthening domestic talent growth in high-priority industries including AI, robotics, med-tech, and green technologies.
These nations aim to produce highly skilled local workforces able to support domestic innovation and reduce long-term dependence on imported expertise. TNE partnerships offer a straightforward pathway by combining international curricula and faculty with industry-aligned training.
A recent example is Austrade’s Business Exchange Mission, which, in September 2024, brought together Australian and Southeast Asian institutions to speed up green-economy skills development in Vietnam and Indonesia. These kinds of initiatives support countries to adopt global best practices while still meeting local labour-market requirements. They also support the creation of new education-industry ecosystems, where training providers, employers, and policymakers collaborate to scale talent fast.
Digital platforms are also playing a growing role. Companies like Alumly are getting ahead of skills gaps by engaging employers and universities together to shape the expertise most needed in the future workplace. Companies gain insights into student employability and skill development and prepare students for a labour market being rapidly reshaped by AI.
International talent as an economic driver
In the Gulf States, TNE is intertwined with broader strategies. The UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are investing heavily in global education partnerships to diversify their economies, strengthen research ecosystems, and upskill local populations.
The UAE, in particular, has established itself as a fast-growing hub for global students. International enrolment recently rose by 29%, with some institutions reporting that foreign students comprise 35% of their student population. This surge reflects how students are attracted by straightforward, accessible visa processes, clear work-permit pathways, and the chance to participate in up-and-coming industries like fintech and AI.
By hosting foreign campuses and cross-border research centres, these countries are leveraging international expertise to speed up domestic development goals. At the same time, they are cultivating local talent pipelines through co-teaching models, workforce-training initiatives, and scholarship programmes.
Maintaining competitiveness amid skill shortages
Facing demographic declines, workforce shortages, and mounting pressure on research funding, countries across Europe including Germany and the UK are relying on international partnerships to maintain teaching capacity and sustain their reputation for high-value research and development (R&D) initiatives.
For the UK, TNE helps to protect against the impact of increasingly strict immigration policies and funding constraints. By collaborating with overseas universities, UK institutions can still benefit from the innovation and global knowledge sharing traditionally gleaned from international students and staff. Meanwhile, they continue to be able to support research ventures feeding talent back into key sectors at home. In October 2025, the Prime Minister announced that an additional two UK universities plan to open branch campuses in India, which takes the total to nine universities in just the past two years.
Facing shortages in engineering, digital skills, and healthcare, Germany uses TNE along with dual-degree programmes, offshore training centres, and internationalised apprenticeships to help create pathways for students to enter Germany’s workforce, whether physically or through remote R&D roles.
Why some regions move faster than others
Although the motivations differ, one common theme connects all countries’ TNE partnerships. This is that TNE has become a vessel for talent development, moving beyond facilitating student mobility and, indeed, the realm of education itself; instead creating a far-reaching strategy that impacts the conditions of the working world across industries. Because of this, the effectiveness of these partnerships hinges on bureaucratic realities.
Approval timelines, regulatory hurdles, visa rules, and requirements for legal entity setup determine how quickly countries can launch or scale TNE initiatives. Nations with streamlined regulatory environments are able to leverage international talent more rapidly and secure a competitive advantage.
In contrast, regions with more complex approval processes or restrictive visa policies often move slowly, limiting their ability to respond to fast-changing skills demands.
As global competition intensifies, the countries that can implement TNE partnerships swiftly and flexibly will be best positioned to meet future workforce needs.
Emma Prodromou, Global Business Expansion & Immigration Manager, joined Mauve Group in 2005. She is responsible for ensuring immigration compliance for global workers, researchers, and faculty staff within the international education sector and beyond. Emma works closely with immigration partners, consular officials, and embassies, and also supports clients in establishing overseas entities.
