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College graduates join the battle for jobs
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AS the number of college graduates soars nationwide, university grads in Hangzhou are scrambling to find jobs, yet they seem unwilling to lower their standards or accept work in fields unrelated to their majors.
About 7.27 million students nationwide are expected to graduate from colleges this year, up 4 percent from a year earlier, according to the education authorities.
Making matters worse is that the employment ratio has declined gradually every year, according to a report by zhilian.com, one of the country’s leading human resources service providers.
As a result of fierce competition for jobs, more students are applying for positions in second-tier cities.
Suzhou tops the “city competition index” while Beijing and Shanghai only finished sixth and eighth on the list.
The index ranks cities on the average number of resumes received for one vacancy by Zhilian.com. Hangzhou ranked 11th with an average of 56 graduates competing for each job.
Guo Heyang, director of the Hangzhou Human Resources and Social Security Bureau, said the city expects 70,000 students to graduate this year and that the government is working to help them find work.
“The priority in our recent work is to help college graduates,” he said.
The city government has introduced several policies to help graduates enter the workforce. They include tax breaks for enterprises employing this year’s graduates and subsidies for graduates who start their own company.
Pressure among graduates to find work has even reached those at prestigious universities.
Zhejiang University journalism major Tang Mi told Shanghai Daily that looking for a job is “super difficult.”
She said she has had about 60 interviews in the past six months. Banks, state-owned firms, television stations and news websites were among the companies that interviewed her. She said she is now working as an intern at a news website.
“Jobs corresponding to my major are limited,” Tang said, adding her classmates face similar problems.
But among the doom and gloom, there is some hope, especially for graduates who majored in IT or e-commerce.
Several e-commerce companies had signs such as “20 vacancies” and “We want 30 interns” at last month’s College Graduates’ Job Fair, organized by the Department of Education of Zhejiang Province.
But Chen, a student doing a master’s degree in telecommunications, said the jobs were mostly customer service positions.
“Sure you will be using a computer, but the jobs are not related to communication skills at all,” Chen said.
Chen said he expects a starting salary of 7,000 yuan (US$1,127) a month.
Lu Xianghua, deputy director of the Recruitment and Employment Office of Hangzhou Dianzi University, said: “We see the IT company jobs are mostly low-end call center positions, or high-end research and development positions, in which case a master’s degree helps.”
According to a survey by baidu.com, students favor jobs in the Internet and finance industries because the starting salaries are usually higher.
Graduates are least likely to go after sales and service-type jobs. They also prefer big companies and state-owned enterprises over privately owned firms, zhilian.com reported.
Wang Ping, associate researcher at the Zhejiang Academy of Social Sciences, said the irony is that college graduates still consider themselves as elites even though many people now have a university degree.
“The unreasonable college education system created this situation,” said Wang. “I suggest college students keep an open mind to all kinds of jobs. Schools also need to offer more workplace training.”
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