According to the College Students Employment Report 2010, it is hard for university graduates to find jobs. However, many employers complain that young workers change jobs frequently, which forces them to constantly hire and train employees. Supposedly, 88 percent of young workers choose to quit their jobs rather than being fired.
From what I've been told, graduates feel their jobs provide little opportunity for future development. And the root cause is the lack of long-term training programs. Most businesses are labor intensive and little training is needed.
Due to a lack of experience and stable social relations, it becomes quite natural and common for graduates to change jobs, especially when they have realistic expectations of better wages through job hopping.
In the long run, graduates become somewhat lost in their pursuit of future development. This will produce a social formula in which talents and labor are not respected, and this will also bring negative effects to the human resources markets, specifically unstable relations between businesses and employees and a rising unemployment rate.
One who obtains more education has higher abilities, and consequently should get higher wages and have a stable job. Education should determine income level. But this isn't the case in China. Education doesn't necessarily change economic status, so graduates aren't rewarded their education investment.
As countries are competing to win talent, Chinese businesses should learn to reevaluate the value of the education their employees possess.
The industrial economy has raised the requirements for education and training. When the entire society develops respect for talent and labor, parents will be encouraged to invest more in education and training for their children. Subsequently, this will help increase businesses' innovation capacity if they hire employees with higher education and better skills.
(This post was first published in Chinese and translated by Zhang Ming'ai.)