Work experience is more valued than educational credentials
16/4/2004 16:22
Both the demand and supply in the local labor market from January to March
this year hit new highs compared to recent years. A total of 234,000 people were
seeking jobs in the first quarter of this year, an increase of 7.8 percent from
the same period last year and 23.8 percent from 2002.
48,000 job hunters
(20.5 percent of the total) have already joined the work force. It is the
highest in recent years and up 16 percent from a year before.
Employers
wanted to recruit a total of 179,000 people in the first quarter of the year, up
6.5 percent from a year before and up 15.4 percent from 2002. Therefore, for
every 100 job seekers there were only 76 positions, fewer than in the past two
years.
High-level technicians were still the hot properties in the local
labor market, with the number of positions 12 times that of applicants. However,
the number of job hunters outpaced the demand for mid and low-level
technicians.
Work experience proved to be more important than educational
credentials in the local labor market. Only 40 percent of local private and
holding companies required a candidate to have a minimum of an associate degree,
with less than 15 percent targeting bachelor's degrees.
Less than half the
jobs offered by joint venture companies required a minimum of an associate
degree, with one-third of them requiring at least bachelor's degrees.
Difficulties for local university graduates in finding jobs have become a
focus of society. An industry analyst suggested that the main barrier to finding
a job is that the applicants were lacking initiative.
Most employers want to
recruit employees below 35. More than 120,000 personnel younger than 35 were
needed in the first quarter of this year, but only about 50,000 applicants of
that age hunted for jobs at that time. Each young person could have at least two
jobs to choose from, he said.
Many parents attended the job markets for
their children, indicating that local young job hunters lack a work ethic and
ambition, the analyst pointed out.
From January to March this year,
applicants between 36 and 45 accounted for 46.8 percent of the total number of
job hunters (more than 100,000), up 40,000 over the past two
years.
Wendy Zhang/ Shanghai Daily news
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