Lenovo launches new initiative to cultivate manufacturing talents

Chinese tech giant Lenovo Group Ltd is working to cultivate more manufacturing talents to pursue industrial upgrade and promote intelligent transformation of production in the nation.

Lenovo has launched a "purple-collar talent initiative" to help foster talents for the new intelligence transformation era.

According to Lenovo, "purple-collar" talents refer to those who meet the requirements of intelligent manufacturing, are familiar with the actual production process, understand the corresponding technical theories, and have both hands-on operation capabilities and management capabilities.

Qiao Jian, senior vice-president of Lenovo, the world's largest personal computer maker, said the company hopes that the "purple-collar talent initiative" can help drive industrial upgrade in China and aid the nation better seek high-quality development of manufacturing.

Under the initiative, Lenovo will leverage its internal sources such as supply chains and its charity foundation to partner with universities and vocational colleges to cultivate people for a wide range of manufacturing industries. Currently, over 10,000 people benefit from Lenovo's vocational education initiative every year, and it aims to expand the scale so that more people can participate in the project.

Liu Baomin, deputy director of the institute of vocational and technical education center at the Ministry of Education, said vocational education during the 14th Five-Year Plan period will need to provide talent support for high-quality economic development.

Deepening school-enterprise cooperation is the core for vocational education. And more efforts are needed to improve the standards system of vocational education to ensure its quality, Liu said.