China to allow foreign investment in vocational training
(Xinhua)
Updated: 2006-08-18 14:39
China's employment authorities have opened up the country's vocational
training to foreign investment so as to meet a growing demand for skilled
workers.
A regulation, issued by the Ministry of Labor and Social
Security, effective from October 1, allows foreign education institutions to
cooperate with Chinese counterparts.
"The Chinese institutions and
programs must not profit from the training activities," said Wang Yadong, deputy
director of the ministry's Employment Training Department.
There are
330,000 job vacancies for skilled workers, such as millers and welders, each
year in Beijing, but there was a dearth of qualified people, and the situation
is the same all over the country, Wang said.
Chinese institutions with
foreign cooperation must be able to train at least 200 people at one time, and
the fixed assets and registered capital of the institutions must exceed 500,000
yuan (62,500 U.S. dollars), according to the regulation.
While
university graduates have been scrambling for jobs in recent years, the
employment rate of secondary vocational school graduates remains high,
statistics from the Ministry of Education show.
From 2001 to 2005, the
employment rate was 95 percent on average, and the average salary of graduates
of secondary vocational schools was higher than college graduates this year in
the cities of Harbin, Hangzhou and Chengdu.
The central government will
invest 10 billion yuan in the infrastructure of vocational education over the
next five years and local governments will spend more than 20 billion yuan in
the initiative.
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