About 40 percent of last year's Shanghai university graduates took technical or manufacturing jobs, which paid better on average than office positions, a recent government survey indicates.
   
The Shanghai Labor and Social Security Bureau surveyed 1,260 local employers about how many fresh graduates they hired over the past nine months and how much they were paid. The report provided salary guidelines for 127 positions.
   
Automobile designers topped the list with an average monthly salary of 3,800 yuan (US$458). Graduates taking up technical positions, such as product designers and mechanical engineers, were paid 2,185 yuan per month on average.
   
Fresh graduates taking office jobs earned an average monthly salary of 1,880 last year. Human resources assistants, for instance, earned 1,800 yuan on average, while administrative clerks were paid only 1,496 yuan per month.
   
Salaries didn't differ much between graduates from different universities and employees working in different local districts, bureau officials said.
   
"As most companies are now attaching greater importance to training and developing technical professionals, it is natural for the salaries for those jobs to rise," said Fang Zhijie of the bureau's salary division.
   
He attributed the relatively low salaries earned by management graduates to their lack of work experience.
   
The report, which is the first ever survey of recent graduate's salaries conducted by a government department, suggested a growing number of grads are taking jobs unrelated to their majors.
   
The report suggests that less than half of arts graduates last year found a job related to their majors. Many of them shifted into better paid professions in the logistics and statistical sectors.

(Shanghai Daily March 15, 2005)