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Last year's job market tough nut to crack
(China Daily)
Updated: 2005-01-04 08:41
Secretaries topped the charts for the most hotly contested job, while
landscape engineers had the easiest time of it finding their career goals, a
2004 Chinese job market survey says.
With an average 237 applicants bidding for a single post, secretaries have
surpassed accountants and sales managers as the most competitive vocation during
the past year, according to a survey of the leading recruitment website
www.zhaopin.com based on its yearly statistics.
The competition was so fierce that more and more
employers expected secretaries to assume greater responsibilities and discretion
in office management rather than simply preparing meeting papers, the survey
indicated.
Students apply for
jobs at a job fair in Xi'an, Northwest China's Shaanxi Province,
displaying 8,000 vacancies from companies across the country, November 14,
2004. [newsphoto] |
It turns out almost all employers advertising at www.zhaopin.com required
secretary candidates to have some journalism, economics or finance credentials,
in addition to a good command of English.
Landscape engineers were much luckier, thanks to the booming real estate
industry that yielded abundant opportunities for the relatively scarce
profession. One landscaping job offered saw just 36 applicants in 2004, the
least competitive of all the professional jobs surveyed by the recruitment
website.
Generally speaking, the 2004 job market remained tense with demand and supply
growing at the same time.
For example, the number of ads seeking electronic and mechanical engineers
via www.zhaopin.com reached 111,780 in 2004, up 57 per cent year-on-year. But
each applicant still had to compete with 70 or so peers given the huge number of
job-seekers. The case was similar with other main job-producing industries, such
as the computer sector and telecommunications.
The intensive competition has made employees more cautious about changing
jobs. Only 10 per cent of the respondents to an online questionnaire by
www.zhaopin.com said they would opt for a new boss in 2005, compared with 16 per
cent to the same question a year ago.
The proportion of those who desire higher salaries in the same position has
risen from 9 per cent a year ago to 15 per cent at present, a sign that more
people are forgoing random job changes in favour of solid development at their
current work.
Nevertheless, the website survey shows that senior professionals still had a
clear upper hand in the fierce competition despite the cloudy employment
climate.
For example, ordinary graduates in accounting or finance now have a difficult
time since the industry saw an average 189 applicants vying for a single post in
2004. But those high-calibre financial professionals with an international
perspective are the real cream of the market. Some 62 foreign banks had opened
204 offices in the country by the end of October, and more cities in the
country's west and northeast will open RMB businesses to foreign banks as
scheduled in China's World Trade Organization accession protocol. There will be
many alluring job opportunities for senior financial professionals as that trend
continues.
The survey also discovered that higher education credentials can be helpful
when it comes to job-seeking. Statistics from the Ministry of Personnel indicate
that in the third quarter of 2004, the number of jobs for college graduates and
postgraduates increased by 3.9 per cent and 1.2 per cent respectively, whereas
that for people with lower than junior college credentials declined 5.1 per
cent.
About 2.8 million students graduated from college in 2004 nationwide.
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