Administrators topped the charts for most hotly contested job,
while landscape engineers had the easiest time of finding
positions, according to a 2004 job market survey by leading
recruitment website www.zhaopin.com.
With an average 237 applicants going for each post, secretaries
and office managers surpassed accountants and sales managers as the
most competitive vocations.
Almost all employers advertising at?www.zhaopin.com
required administrative candidates to have some journalism,
economics or finance credentials, in addition to a good command of
English.
Landscape engineers were much luckier, thanks to a booming real
estate industry providing abundant opportunities for this
relatively scarce profession. Each landscaping opening attracted
just 36 applicants on average, the least competitive of all the
professional jobs surveyed.
Generally speaking, the job market remained tense with demand
and supply both growing.
For example, the number of ads on the website seeking electronic
and mechanical engineers reached 111,780 in 2004, up 57 percent on
the previous year. But each applicant still had to compete with 70
or so others. This was repeated in other keys sectors of
employment, such as IT and telecommunications.
Intensive competition made employees more cautious about
changing jobs. Only 10 percent of respondents to an online
questionnaire on the same website said they would consider a switch
this year, compared to 16 percent a year ago.
The proportion of those who wanted higher salaries in the same
position rose from 9 percent a year ago to 15 percent, a sign that
more are forgoing random job changes in favor of solid career
development.
Nevertheless, senior professionals still had a clear upper hand
in the fierce competition despite a cloudy employment climate.
Ordinary graduates in accounting or finance had a hard time with
an average 189 applicants vying for a single post. But high-caliber
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.
Higher education credentials were also helpful. The Ministry of
Personnel said that in the third quarter of 2004, the number of
jobs for college graduates and postgraduates increased by 3.9 and
1.2 percent respectively, whereas that for people without junior
college credentials declined 5.1 percent.
About 2.8 million students graduated from college in 2004
nationwide.
(China Daily January 4, 2005)
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