Officials in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang have expressed concern at a record number of college graduates who will enter the local job market next year.

A massive 18.9 per cent increase in these young jobseekers will put enormous pressure on the province's job market.

Nearly 113,000 students will graduate next July from more than 40 universities and colleges of this northernmost province of China.

Although the number is a record, according to sources at the province's education bureau, the composition of the graduates will not change much.

Graduates

The numbers of graduates from professional training colleges and those studying bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees all have witnessed a steady growth.

"The employment situation is very severe," said Zhang Minghua, an official from the education bureau in charge of graduate employment.

Most of China's universities and colleges began to enlarge their enrollment in 1999 and five years of consecutive expansion have brought an ever-increasing number of graduates.

This is compounded by the comparably small increase in job vacancies which cannot keep pace with the rising number of new graduates, according to Zhang.

Many of the province's institutions do not plan to recruit more new staff in the near future.

And he noted that a considerable number of graduates are too "optimistic" about the employment situation and are unwilling to "sell themselves" when the offered salaries disappoint them, resulting in a waste of vacancies.

"We now call for all the graduates-to-be to get a job first, then to choose a career," he said.

"The key to jobseeking is to get some information," said Jia Lebin from the Heilongjiang Provincial Labor and Social Security Bureau.

The bureau publishes daily employment bulletins in the Heilongjiang Daily.

And the province's human resources center will hold a large-scale job fair every Tuesday and Thursday.

The bureau is also working with Heilongjiang University to establish an entrepreneur center for the new graduates.

"This is aimed at encouraging graduates to get a promising future career based on their own efforts," said Jia.

Although there is still more than six months before graduation, the jobseeking campaign has already kicked off.

Many universities and colleges in the province have begun to organize all kinds of job fairs and provide some employment guidance.

"We will try our best to offer more job opportunities for our graduates and find ways to release job information," said Zhang Chi, director of the Graduates Employment Center of Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), one of the largest universities of Heilongjiang Province.

The university set up a website to publish employment information and has helped more than 15,000 graduates find jobs, according to him.

"We also made some adjustments according to the demand for certain types of jobs," he said.

Oversupply

With more people eager to enter management-related fields, there has tended to be an oversupply in the number of graduates.

Thus, the enrollment of the management institution of HIT has shrunk to a little more than 300 from nearly 600 two years ago.

"The figure of 300 basically achieved a balance between supply and demand," he said.

(China Daily November 15, 2004)