The current foreign membership in Shanghai exceeds 1,500 after starting with
fewer than 100.
Most of the foreigners aged 25 to 40 look for jobs related to marketing,
consulting or business strategy, according to a regional organizer for the club
surnamed Xu.
"There is an increasing recognition of how difficult it is to get a good job
in the city among these foreign job hunters, which can be summed up by saying
fierce competition, language barrier and their high pay expectation," she said.
Larry Wang, managing director of Wang & Li Asia Resources, said many
companies were naive and inexperienced in employment of foreign staff five or
six years ago, and as a result, they were overpaying their foreigners.
Now they are being paid more in line with their appropriate market value and
worth, he said.
"The key point is how you can perform in the competitive market," Wang said.
"If these people don't know the market well and don't have knowledge of the
country, why should companies look for foreigners to work for them?
"On the other hand, the market is becoming more mature; in other words, there
is a big pool of local talent, which makes the market more competitive for
foreigners."
According to Wang, many Chinese university graduates those from Tsinghua
University and Peking University, for instance are well educated with good
language skills even though they have never studied overseas. They surf the
Internet every day and keep pace with the world.
It might take a bit of time to train these motivated people to be suitable
for the better jobs, but they ask for more affordable salaries.
Wang estimated that more than 95 per cent of the junior managers at
multi-international companies are Chinese, not foreign.
