Anticipating a tight job market in South China's Guangdong Province, officials have called on college students graduating next year to shun positions in government and turn instead to small and mid-sized businesses for jobs.

More job opportunities may lie in the province's myriad small and mid-sized enterprises next year, said an official from the Guangdong provincial government.

The move aims to ease the province's grim employment situation in 2005.

"We are declining to encourage college graduates to compete for civil servant posts because competition for employment in local government departments and organizations has been extremely fierce," said the official.

"This year, less than 10 percent of the college graduates have become civil servants," the official said.

And in some hot government departments, including customs and foreign affairs, merely 2 percent of the candidates have been recruited, the official added.

Sources from the Guangdong Provincial Personnel Bureau revealed that there will be more than 170,000 university students, postgraduates and doctorate-degree holders who will graduate and have to find jobs in Guangdong Province next year.

This is an increase of 24 percent from this year's total of 132,500.

Furthermore, more than 80,000 Guangdong college students who are now studying in other regions of the country will also graduate and return home to find jobs in the province in 2005, the official said.

Despite employment pressure, however, the official is optimistic about the province's employment prospects for college students next year.

Guangdong registers more than 250,000 small and medium-sized businesses which are in need of a large number of qualified professionals and skilled personnel for their expansions, the official said.

He believes most of the college graduates will be employed if they would like to work with such businesses in the province, where students' abilities can be put to good use.

He also urged graduates to get ready for working in the province's small and middle cities, counties and even townships.

More than 95 percent of graduates have been employed this year, more than 75 percent of whom have been employed in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Foshan, Zhongshan, Donguan, Huizhou and other prosperous cities in the Pearl River Delta.

And Fan Chaogui, director of the Guangdong Provincial Bureau of Labor and Social Security, said Guangdong has set a goal of bringing the province's urban unemployment rate to under 3.5 per cent next year.

(China Daily November 8, 2004)