Bright Graduates Sink in Flooded China Job Pool
Tue Mar 16, 2004 10:50 AM ET
By Jonathan Ansfield
BEIJING (Reuters) - Just a few years back, Pei Pei might have been headhunted home to China from London, lured with a fat salary and tagged a "sea turtle" -- a Chinese pun for overseas returnees.
Instead, friends call her "seaweed" -- a less amusing play on words. It means she's out of a job.
"I had never been unemployed until I came back," shrugged the 26-year-old, a media studies major at London University. "But I do believe I'm typical 'seaweed'."
She might as well have stayed at home. Pei is one of hundreds of thousands caught in the undertow of China's market for student labor, deluged by a glut of graduates.
China's leaders trumpeted job creation as a critical task at this month's annual session of the National People's Congress, or parliament.
Itinerant farmers are flooding cities where factory hands are already being dumped by state firms gone bust. Now leaders have to figure out how to absorb the nation's best and brightest.
There are 2.5 times as many graduates seeking work now than in 2001, crashing on to the job circuit just as companies, maturing and stingier, are putting a premium on work experience.
Cut-throat competition is squeezing starting salaries, down 40 percent from last year, according to some Web site surveys.
Experts question whether this privileged generation is up against economic realities, or unrealistic expectations.
Either way, many students are sucked into the workforce at entry-level posts, grumbling that they're overqualified and underpaid. Rather than answer phones, some are simply choosing to wait.
For sea turtles beaching on the motherland's shores, it's been a rocky homecoming. Their numbers reached a record 22,100 students in 2003, up 12.3 percent from the previous year, the Ministry of Education reportedThose with work earned an average 43,000 yuan ($5,200) in 2003, down from 60,000 yuan in 2001 and 50,000 in 2002, according to a recent survey by of 51job.com, one of China's biggest human resources sites.
Until the right job comes along, Pei has opted to go back to peddling ads at the agency where she worked before attending London's Goldsmith College. She makes 4,000 yuan a month, or 48,000 yuan a year.
"Study abroad is a kind of investment for the future, it's natural to ask for repayment," said 51job's Wang Jian. "But if young sea turtles have less working experience, they can become seaweed."
TIDE ROLLS IN
Government policy lies behind the rise in job-seeker numbers. In 1999, in part to divert job pressure, China began allowing universities and technical schools to expand class sizes.
Five years on, the tide is rolling in. Some 2.8 million new graduates are fishing for jobs this year, 680,000 more than last year, according to the ministry.
Gone are the talent-poor days of the 1990s. Multinationals like Motorola and domestic tech giants like Legend once had to raid MIT labs or Wall Street trading posts for the right blend of managerial skills, technical know-how and English fluency.
But since the world economy slumped, and China's Internet bubble burst, many large corporations in China have trimmed their payrolls, either by downsizing or localizing en masse. Companies from Microsoft to China's Huawei Technologies have built spacious training centers.
"It's cheaper and easier to hire undergraduates fresh out of top Chinese universities and train them for two or three years," said Caren Zhao, of headhunters China Team.
A decade ago, a returning manager or engineer might command a $70,000-$80,000 package; now top recruits get $12,000-$18,000, she said.
Already foreign schooling, which sometimes amounts to a cash-for-diploma gap year, is not the panacea it once was. Some 11,730 people left to study last year, down 6.3 percent from 2002, says the ministry.
A boom in post-grad curricula at home gives aspirants plenty to choose from, such as executive MBAs and video game programming.
HEAD WEST?
China kept the registered unemployment rate at 4.3 percent in 2003, despite the SARS outbreak, but the real rate may be closer to 10 percent in cities. Labour and Social Security Minister Zheng Silin said this week that an estimated 24 million city dwellers would seek jobs in China this year and the government aimed to create openings for 14 million of them.
Students are the least of the problems, some economists say.
"Their difficulties have nothing to do with the labor market as a whole," said Cai Fang, director of the Population and Labor Economy Institute at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "It is that their expectations are too high."
Cai had a proposition. "Why are they all so keen on Beijing or Shanghai? Why don't they go out to China's west?"
He showed little sympathy. "I think it's quite natural for an MBA to work as an assistant or secretary."
MBA sea turtle Lin Yunfei, 24, is learning to accept that.
After rebasing from the University of Aberdeen late last year, she waded through throngs of people at Beijing's job fairs.
"But it was a waste of time, because I could not even find the right position. I handed in only one or two resumes."
So she combed the Web.
"Some HR corporations found me. They asked if I was interested in vacancies for receptionists," she said. "I declined."
This month, she starts work as a secretary for a news agency. Starting monthly pay -- 5,000 yuan. ($1=8.276 Yuan) (Reuters Messaging:jonathan.ansfield.reuters.com@reuters.net; +8610 6586-5566 x204)
© Reuters 2004. All Rights Reserved.
reuters.com |
