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Many graduates still find a difficult job market
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IT took Carrie Xu half a year to land her first job in marketing at a state-owned company. Xu, 22, graduated from Fudan University this year in Chinese language and literature.
Like most of the new graduates, Xu started job hunting in September during her junior year. After dozens of written examinations and interviews, she finally found a position at a leading cosmetics company in China. “It’s not bad, actually, to land a job at this speed. Many of my classmates are still looking for a job,” Xu tells Shanghai Daily.
With a bachelor of arts degree, no matter how much the young woman enjoys Chinese literature, she has to admit that this major narrowed her employment options.
Xu is among 89,000 college graduates in Shanghai to enter the labor market this year. While her major was one of 10 most popular courses of study in Shanghai, it led to a low employment rate over the past two years, according to a report by the Ministry of Education.
The report, released last week, noted the majors with low employment prospects nationwide, in a nudge to universities to improve their course offerings.
Conditions vary from place to place but, in general, marketing and administrative management were listed as the worst majors in which to get a job.
“Now there are too many universities and fewer colleges,” says Yu Hai, a sociologist at Fudan University. “And basically every university in China is extending its finance and marketing department. The question is whether or not they have the qualified educational resources for these departments.”
Yu says he has witnessed a great leap in higher education now that universities are becoming more practical in the courses they offer. But while they have created popular majors — law, marketing, software engineering — to attract students, they can be ill-equipped to teach them well, so graduates often come out lacking a strong knowledge base.
“This will eventually lead to low employment in some majors because the students saturate the job market,” the sociologist explains.
Xu, who graduated in the summer, always wanted to work in traditional media — as a reporter or editor — like what most seniors in her major did. She had several internships at newspapers and television stations, but in the end they all told her there would be no vacancies this year.
“As for publishing, I didn’t even see any public notice for recruiting,” she says. “Then I had to look for other options in marketing, sales and finance.”
Despite graduating from a top university in China, famous for its art courses, Xu found it difficult to land a good job that matched her specialty.
Actually she is not alone. “Some of my friends had to turn to small and medium-sized companies as they were not good enough for big enterprises in marketing or finance,” she says.
Tall and slim and speaking fluent English, Xu says she has tried many times with major international companies and top accounting firms.
“I always failed in the last phase,” she says. “No matter how much you have prepared before the last interview, when the interviewer asked about professional matters in finance, I felt a lack of confidence about my major. And there was no way I could compete with others.”
For many students, especially those in conventionally popular majors such as law, Chinese literature and marketing, the problem is not that they have trouble in landing a job but that there’s a gap between the job itself and their expectations, says Yu.
William Qu, a senior student majoring in law at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, on the other hand, didn’t encounter too many difficulties when looking for a job.
“From what I heard, the employment rate of law in our university is quite stable; graduates mostly go to law firms, banks and international accounting firms,” he says. “Because when a company is recruiting, not merely your major is considered but your university as well.”
According to Sun Weilong, a postgraduate student and school counselor in the law department of Jiao Tong University, 97 percent of the graduates in law landed a job, proceeded to postgraduate study or went abroad. Only half of the graduates landed a job related to their major.
“Of course it’s getting harder and harder in job hunting. We all thought 2012 was the toughest year but 2013 proved that it’s still getting worse,” says Sun. “But luckily most Jiao Tong University graduates can find a job in Shanghai. After all, the university sells itself.”
But it was quite a different experience for Liu Jia, 23, a graduate in marketing of a second-tier university. When he entered the job market, he couldn’t find any position in Shanghai. He ended up in a Japanese automobile company selling cars.
“In the job fairs, most companies saw the name of my university and showed absolutely no interest,” he recalls.
Yu suggests there should be more vocational-technical schools and technical colleges that provide advanced education to young people in certain expertise, instead of so many comprehensive universities.
“And by that, we should give enough respect and social reorganization to these technical talents,” he says.
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