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Secretaries topped the charts for the most hotly contested job, while
landscape engineers had the easiest time of it finding their career goals,
a 2004 Chinese job market survey says.
With an average 237 applicants bidding for a
single post, secretaries have surpassed
accountants and sales managers as the most competitive
vocation during the past year, according to a survey of the leading
recruitment website www.zhaopin.com based on its yearly statistics.
The competition was so fierce that more and more
employers expected secretaries to assume greater responsibilities and
discretion
in office
management rather than simply preparing meeting papers, the survey
indicated.
It turns out almost all employers advertising at www.zhaopin.com
required secretary candidates to have some journalism, economics or
finance credentials, in addition to a good command of English.
Landscape engineers were much luckier, thanks to the booming real
estate industry that yielded abundant opportunities for the relatively
scarce profession. One landscaping job offered saw just 36 applicants in
2004, the least competitive of all the professional jobs surveyed by the
recruitment website.
Generally speaking, the 2004 job market remained tense with demand and
supply growing at the same time.
For example, the number of ads seeking electronic and mechanical
engineers via www.zhaopin.com reached 111,780 in 2004, up 57 per cent
year-on-year. But each applicant still had to compete with 70 or so peers
given the huge number of job-seekers. The case was similar with other main
job-producing industries, such as the computer sector and
telecommunications.
The intensive competition has made employees more
cautious about changing jobs. Only 10 per cent of the respondents to an
online questionnaire
by www.zhaopin.com said they would opt for a new boss in
2005, compared with 16 per cent to the same question a year ago.
The proportion of those who desire higher salaries in the same position
has risen from 9 per cent a year ago to 15 per cent at present, a sign
that more people are forgoing random job changes in favour of solid
development at their current work.
Nevertheless, the website survey shows that senior professionals still
had a clear upper hand in the fierce competition despite the cloudy
employment climate.
For example, ordinary graduates in accounting or finance now have a
difficult time since the industry saw an average 189 applicants vying for
a single post in 2004. But those high-calibre financial professionals with
an international perspective are the real cream of the market. Some 62
foreign banks had opened 204 offices in the country by the end of October,
and more cities in the country's west and northeast will open RMB
businesses to foreign banks as scheduled in China's World Trade
Organization accession protocol. There will be many alluring job
opportunities for senior financial professionals as that trend continues.
The survey also discovered that higher education credentials can be
helpful when it comes to job-seeking. Statistics from the Ministry of
Personnel indicate that in the third quarter of 2004, the number of jobs
for college graduates and postgraduates increased by 3.9 per cent and 1.2
per cent respectively, whereas that for people with lower than junior
college credentials declined 5.1 per cent.
About 2.8 million students graduated from college in 2004
nationwide.
(China Daily) | 
Updated: 2005-01-04 10:28
