China’s Nascent Tech Sectors Need 10M Workers by 2025

Jobs involving artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, and esports in particular will face worker shortages in the coming years

China will face a massive shortage of human resources in emerging job sectors in the next five years, according to a report released Thursday.

There will be a gap of 10 million people in the country’s technology industry given innovation advancements and the required talent to fulfill newly developed tasks, said the report jointly released by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and e-commerce giant Alibaba’s mobile workplace app DingTalk. The country will require nearly 1.5 million cloud computing engineers, about 5 million specialists in Internet of Things technology, as well as 1 million drone drivers.

“In recent years, with the widespread application of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, big data, and cloud computing in China, related high-tech industries have become a new growth point in China’s economy,” the report said. “The demand for employees has substantially increased, forming a relatively stable group of practitioners.”

The rapid growth of the emerging tech sectors is seen as a major contribution to China’s aim of becoming a more technologically advanced nation.

In the past few years, the country’s soaring progress in esports, 5G, and AI technology has made headlines. Most recently, Beijing also released its ambitious two-year plan to incorporate blockchain technology in various sectors throughout the city, aiming to become a blockchain hub by 2022.

Since April 2019, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the State Administration of Market Supervision, and the National Bureau of Statistics have officially recognised 38 new occupations, including esports-related jobs, blockchain engineers, and urban management data collectors and distributors. However, the country will witness a shortage of jobs in many of these sectors, including esports operators and industrial robot system operators, as they will require millions of workers in the coming years, Thursday’s report said.

Liu Kang, a senior official with the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, told domestic media earlier this month that the new occupations would be “conducive to promoting employment and entrepreneurship, conducive to training talent, and conducive to developing industry.”

According to the new report, millennials are more likely to take up the new professions. Meanwhile, those from Generation Z are particularly worried about their employment prospects, with the majority concerned about unemployment.

Editor: Bibek Bhandari.

(Header image: People seeking employment line up at a job market in Haikou, Hainan province, May 20, 2020. People Visual)