Public relations employees are experiencing some of the fastest rising salaries of any group in China, a new survey has revealed.

While some large corporations in China may have had a troubled first half of 2005, with KFC, Procter & Gamble, Nestle, Colgate-Palmolive, Haagen-Dazs, and Bright Dairy all facing public relations crises, their problems have been a boon to those charged with representing them to the public.

Zhaopin.com, one of China's leading human resources websites, researched salaries in several economic sectors and found those in the PR and information technology industries had grown the most in the first six months of this year, based on more than 2.2 million job applications and offers on the company's database.

The average salary for PR employees witnessed a sharp increase of 11 per cent year-on-year over the first six months of 2005.

On June 27, the number of job vacancies in Beijing's media and PR industries stood at 2,336.

"It's a rapid increase," said Hao Jian, a senior adviser on human resources with Zhaopin.com who headed the research project. "Big corporations were seeking methods to rescue their damaged reputations; therefore, they turned to PR staff who are experienced at spinning such crises."

Liu Xiping - managing director of the Beijing office of Weber Shandwick, one of the world's leading PR companies - said: "We cannot change what has happened in the crises, but we can change how people view them."

According to Liu, the number of his employees in Beijing has increased by 20 per cent in the first half of the year, which "also shows the momentum of the boom in China's PR industry.

"However, crisis management is only a small part of our business," Liu said. "This is thanks to China's booming market economy. Facing fierce competition, corporations in China are attaching more importance to their public images and establishing their brands.

"PR expertise is needed for such a big market and salaries for people in the area are rising by a big margin."

In the information technology sector, salaries in the hardware industry have increased by 24 per cent year-on-year in the first six months, the highest of any sector. For software workers, salary growth in the first six months of the year was 18 per cent, compared to 4.9 per cent for the whole of last year.

"Software is no longer confined to technical uses and has become greatly diversified," Hao said. "We have computer games, enterprise intelligence review software and mobile phone software. Software has an increasingly close relationship with people's daily lives."

The report said white-collar salaries in China have increased by 4.6 per cent in the six months since the end of last year.

(China Daily July 5, 2005)