By Yvonne TAO Yi
If a Chinese graduate received offers both from multinational companies and government departments, guess which one would he/she would prefer?
Eighty percent of graduates would prefer to be civil servants, I bet.
When I worked in a career development center of a university from 2006-2009, I found an interesting ranking of different employers for graduates. To work in Government offices was the first choice, while state-run corporations and institutions were following them, and the multinational corporations fell to the third.
Why do Government offices and state-run corporations become overwhelmingly popular? It was the stability according to most graduates. Stability means low risk to be fired. It’s important because of the high unemployment and economic crisis. There will be about 6.3 million graduates this year, and the number was 6.1 million last year; however, the jobs don’t increase accordingly to meet the demands. It’s really hard and becoming harder every year for graduates to hunt for a job. Moreover, government offices and state-run corporations rarely lay off employees, while most multinational companies are downsizing in the crisis. Lay-off and high turnover drive graduates away.
Now it comes to another question, why does stability become more important than any other factors like payments and career development? It was the One Child Policy in China. To control the population, China carried out One Child Policy from 1980, and the graduates are exactly born at that time. They grew up in love and care of their parents or even grandparents. Families’ wills affect their decisions, and the safety and stability are the most important factors parents care about. Females are more likely to be affected and prefer stable jobs.
About the author
Yvonne TAO Yi is a fulltime student in the international MBA program at Lingnan (University) College, Sun Yat-sen University, in Guangzhou, China. She badly loves Agatha Christie’s detective novels and dreams to live in the mountains with valleys.