China jobs: struggling youth embrace emerging gigs, but will the tedium zonk them out?
- A day in the life of some of these jobs is a bit of a grind, but they offer relatively easy work in high demand, ‘as long as you have hands’
- Emerging industries such as data labelling could help China’s policymakers curb rampant and steadily rising unemployment among young adults
For Li Jiamei, the monotony of labelling data for hours on end is matched perhaps only by the ambivalence she feels after grinding away like a machine every workday. But work is work, and the 22-year-old is just happy to have an easy job to make ends meet.
At 9am, Li stands in front of a facial-recognition camera at the Baidu Intelligent Cloud Data Labelling Base in Jiangxi province. Within minutes of logging in, she begins scrutinising piece after piece of information, properly tagging each one based on its content.
This day in the life of an emerging-industries data labeller ends at 6.30pm. The job involves identifying raw data, such as images, text files and videos. Data labellers need to add one or more labels to provide context so that a machine-learning model can learn from it.
“Spending too much time on data labelling sometimes makes my eyes and neck a bit uncomfortable, especially when dealing with large amounts of text. It can be nauseating,” Li said. Prior to joining the data-labelling base in August, she worked as a kindergarten teacher for two years, which was her major in junior college. But she quit her job, as it was exhausting and paid very little.
“Data labelling can be done from home with just a computer, without worrying about losing the job due to the pandemic or some natural disasters,” Li said. “This is not a technical position requiring expertise, and the threshold is low. It’s worth trying.”
