More measures needed to ensure employment stability

Minister of Education Chen Baosheng called on local authorities and universities on Monday to make greater efforts to ensure new college graduates can find employment as soon as possible.

With less than two months until fresh graduates leave campus, all sectors should make every attempt to ensure that more graduates can find jobs to keep the employment situation stable, he said.

Employment for college graduates concerns the livelihoods of millions of families, as well as social and economic development and social stability, Chen said at the opening ceremony of college graduate recruitment week in Beijing.

Ensuring stable employment requires concerted efforts from education authorities, universities and enterprises, he added.

The recruitment week, which opened on Monday at China Agricultural University, aims to provide college graduates with job opportunities and to help universities and employers better align graduates and available positions.

Each provincial-level region will organize at least two large-scale job fairs during the week.

An offline job fair for college graduates in Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei province was held at the university on Monday, offering 23,000 posts to graduates. In addition, an online job fair is expected to provide almost 70,000 posts to graduates in the regions during the week.

The pressure for college graduates to find employment has increased in recent years, and the difficulty of landing jobs has become a hot social issue, Chen said. The employment situation remains complex and challenging, and it should be viewed from a long-term perspective, he added.

China is expected to see a record 9.09 million college graduates this year－350,000 more than last year, according to the Education Ministry.

As universities are expected to have a larger number of graduates in the coming years, there will be more pressure to ensure stable employment, he said.

The development of the digital economy has created many new jobs and will offer new channels for college graduates to find employment, Chen said.

Chen Xue'er, 22, a senior at Beijing Jiaotong University, attended the job fair on Monday and submitted a dozen resumes to employers.

She said she prefers State-owned enterprises or work for government institutions, as the COVID-19 pandemic has made her realize the importance of job stability.

Yin Jianshu, who works for the career center at Central South University in Changsha, Hunan province, said an increasing number of graduates show a strong willingness to become government officials or work for SOEs, as they believe the jobs are less vulnerable to risks.

The number of graduates who want to pursue higher degrees has also increased significantly in recent years for self-improvement and better chances to land good jobs, he said.

China's surveyed urban unemployment rate stood at 5.1 percent in April. That is lower by 0.9 of a percentage point than the same period last year and 0.2 of a percentage point lower than that of March, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Monday.

In the first four months of this year, 4.37 million new urban jobs were created. The surveyed unemployment rate among those between the ages of 25 and 59－the majority of the labor market－stood at 4.6 percent last month, the bureau said.