A student from vocational college taking part in an applied robotics competition in Dongguan, Guangdong Province. Photo: PEOPLE’S DAILY

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Li Dewei rated the employment market this year as “promising as always,” noting that graduation season is a fight for talent among enterprises. Li is the director of the Department of Publicity at Changzhou Technician College Jiangsu Province. His college has 544 graduates while its first job fair attracted 157 employers with 3,593 positions. The number of job vacancies for CNC machining professionals is twelve times the number of applicants.

“The employment rate is very high,” said Cai Jun, director of the School of Preschool Education at Xi’an University of Arts and Sciences. In the past three years, the university’s employment rate was 98 percent on average. This year, many students have already found jobs.

“There is some pressure,” said the person in charge of the Employment Guidance Center at Huazhong Agricultural University, noting that a larger proportion of the Class of 2019 chose to take the entrance exams for graduate schools due to the unsatisfactory employment environment last year. The number of students who failed the exams in February has increased. These graduates are pressed to get hired this spring.

Graduates from different regions, universities and majors are displaying a wide range of performance in the job market. Mo Rong is vice president of the Chinese Academy of Labor and Social Security. In his view, although the macro economy is facing downward pressure, the better quality of economic development in recent years has created a favorable employment environment for graduates this year.

The demand for high-quality talent is booming as the emphasis on economic growth has turned to an economy driven by consumption. Mo explained, “investment-driven economic growth has more demand for ordinary labor than for university degree holders. In contrast, a consumption-driven economy highlights innovation, service and quality and follows a new trajectory of integrating itself with informatization, the modern service industry and low-carbon development, which will expand the demand for high caliber college graduates.”

The transformation and upgrading of traditional sectors has opened greater opportunities for capable people. This process calls for more talent. In recent years, many enterprises, including private companies equipped with excellent operations management, have lifted the educational threshold for employees. For example, in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, enterprises are hungry for skilled technicians, such as auto repair workers and CNC machine tool manufactures, who can make a salary as high as 80,000 yuan per year.

Talented graduates will find better career development in thriving new industries. “The emergence of new industries and new models, coupled with the blowout growth of the platform and sharing economies, is increasing hiring all the time. In addition, the talent market has adopted a more flexible allocation mechanism. College graduates’ more diverse perspectives on employment help them find jobs or get hired through new avenues such as entrepreneurship. New businesses and industries have increased their demand for labor and the actual number of jobs they have added in recent years, according to human resources market data.

 “Therefore, the current employment situation for college graduates is still relatively stable,” Mo said. No signs have pointed to a worsening job market for graduates.

At the end of 2018, Zhilian Recruitment, one of China’s largest providers of hiring information, released the “Report on Job Market Prosperity Index for 2019 Graduates,” showing that the number of graduate job seekers has grown by 21 percent and employers plan to hire 81 percent more college graduates from the Class of 2019 than they did from the previous graduating class. Therefore, the index increased to 2.68 as of December 2018 from the 1.78 of 2017. The job market for graduates this year is brighter than that in 2018. Of the surveyed 2019 university graduates, 45.6 percent have received offers from employers.

 

This article was translated from Renmin Daily.

​edited by MA YUHONG