How online training could help unskilled graduates land jobs in a highly competitive market.
By Qie Xiaoye
It’s the heart of the job hunting season in China as the country enters summer. Millions of soon-to-be college graduates crowd into job fairs and hiring events. The size of many of these events, like almost everything in China, is daunting.
Twenty thousand students crammed into a convention hall the size of a football field at a fair I attended last year in eastern China’s Jiangsu province. They jostled their way from booth to booth, sporting budget suits and clutching folders of resumes. Surrounding the most coveted booths was a perpetual scrum as candidates elbowed and shoved their way to the front, halting briefly to slap a resume on the table and shout an introduction over the roar of the crowd before being absorbed back into its ranks.
In 2015, China pumped out a record 7.5 million college graduates, up from 6.3 million in 2010, and this figure is only expected to grow in 2016. But with the ballooning number of graduates comes an increasing crunch for job openings that fulfill the lofty expectations of this millennial generation.
Many graduates are not equipped with the skills they need to enter the workforce in anything but positions they deem to be below them. But without practical experience, they are effectively commoditized and pitted against millions of other unremarkable candidates. Modern, competitive companies want nimble-minded, adaptable workers who can handle many different tasks and be relied on to make sound decisions.
And yet, year after year China’s educational system churns out millions of graduates who have been groomed to do nothing beyond take tests — excellent only at memorizing dates or quotes. They are not trained to be independent thinkers, nor are they equipped with real skills or knowledge that they will need to succeed when working in teams, completing projects, and communicating with others.
Without completely overhauling the country’s entire education system, one of the best solutions is to strengthen candidates’ skills through focused vocational training.
I learned this myself two decades ago when I graduated from the Kunming University of Science and Technology in machine automation. I picked up my diploma, bought a suit, printed out a briefcase of resumes, and went out expecting to land a job managing mechanical equipment in one of southern China’s thousands of factories.
What greeted me instead was entry-level factory work that required strong hands and a blank mind. I didn’t settle. Instead I spent 5,000 yuan (about $600 at the time) in Linux Systems Administration training courses and less than a half-year later I landed a job working as a server engineer at a consultancy in Hong Kong that paid five times more than what I had been offered as a factory grunt.
I spend a lot of my time outside Beijing and Shanghai in China’s second and third-tier cities — places filled out by construction cranes. The country’s growing middle class has transformed many previously low-slung skylines into densely populated residential towers.
But for all of the glitter and fresh capital in these cities, the resource that perhaps matters most — human talent — is lacking. The best students, the best teachers, the most sought-after professionals flock to the first-tier cities where opportunities abound and salaries are high. But this exodus of talent leaves the populations of many poorer cities without the means to learn from industry professionals.
This has given rise to an industry of online vocational education. Using the Internet, vocational colleges can connect people and share information across huge distances. They offer the key to closing the gap between opportunity and knowledge in China’s first-tier cities and the rest of the country.
I ended up working for close to a decade in the Internet technology sector before founding an offline training school in 2005. In 2013 we took ourselves online with 5WIN. We target students who leave their campuses with a diploma but little direction, unsure of where their first paycheck will come from, or even where to start.
I am convinced that for China’s industries to keep growing and for students across the country to continue finding fulfilling careers, vocational training is the way forward. It is a path that has enriched me personally, and one that I am devoted to sharing with young Chinese across the country, as they strive to gain the skills and resources needed for a fruitful career.
(Header image: A girl reads a billboard listing employment opportunities at a job fair at Donghua University in Shanghai, Dec. 13, 2008. Lu Haitao/Sixth Tone)
Author Bio:
Qie Xiaoye is the CEO of 5WIN, an online vocational training platform based in Beijing.
