Young Chinese jobseekers who can’t find work feel increasingly lost in oversaturated labour pool
- Students lament a ‘degradation of academic qualifications’ in China, as a master’s degree from a top university has become the threshold for many positions
- Analysts do not expect China’s labour market to improve much for college graduates in the next year or two
Armed with a master’s degree from Hong Kong and a bachelor’s from Canada, Zheng Sihan did not expect her job hunt in mainland China to be so difficult.
“This is my second time as a graduate looking for a job on the mainland,” said Zheng, who earned her undergraduate degree in accounting last year. “I didn’t receive a desirable job offer at that time, so I decided to take a postgraduate year and join a new round of mainland recruitment.”
But even after padding her résumé with an advanced degree, her hunt has yielded even less than it did last year.
“Finding a job on the mainland has become very hard,” Zheng lamented in Hong Kong, where she will finish up her postgraduate programme next year. “It’s getting harder year by year. I probably won’t go back to the mainland to find a job.”
Zheng is among millions of college graduates who have grown increasingly frustrated amid the employment situation in China.
