Job market improves in first half year
By Zhang Lu (China Daily)
Updated: 2004-08-11 09:30

China's job market blossomed in the second quarter of 2004, with both the numbers of job vacancies and job seekers increasing in the first quarter of the year, according to the Ministry of Labour and Social Security.

The ministry released a report on the situation of job markets in 113 major cities across the country late last month.

The 113 cities have a total urban population of 164 million, which is about 63 per cent of China's total urban population, and 61.9 million employees.

The ministry's statistics show that, during the period, the job markets in the 113 cities registered 3.801 million posts and 4.083 million job seekers.

The numbers were 81.9 per cent and 64.5 per cent higher over the same period last year, as China's job market at that time was heavily affected by the SARS outbreak.

On a quarterly basis, the number of offered posts increased by 575,000, a 19 per cent growth. And there were 394,000 more job seekers than the first quarter of this year, an increase of 11.6 per cent.

As the growth in market demand was higher than that of the number of job seekers, the job/candidate ratio rose slightly by 0.04 of a point to 0.93 in the second quarter.

The unbalanced situation between supply and demand in China's job market has been becoming better in recent years, statistics from the ministry show.

In the second quarter of 2001, the ratio was just 0.69, which means 100 job seekers were competing for 69 job opportunities.

During the April to June period, the tertiary industry still offered most job opportunities, though the proportion was much lower than three years ago.

The number of new posts in the tertiary industry was 65.4 per cent of the total, 2.2 percentage points up over the first quarter of this year.

The figure was 72.6 per cent in the second quarter of 2001.

Employment opportunities in primary and secondary industry accounted for 2.6 per cent and 32 per cent of the total respectively.

Statistics also show that demands for personnel came from three major business fields - social services, manufacturing, and the trade and catering business.

The numbers of posts offered by the three business fields respectively accounted for 15.8 per cent, 24.9 per cent, and 31.3 per cent of the total during the period.

Demand from the manufacturing industry fell by 2.5 percentage points compared with the first quarter of this year, while posts offered by social services, and trade and catering business rose by 1.5 and 0.7 percentage points respectively.

Another feature in China's job market during the second quarter of 2004 was that more than 90 per cent of job opportunities came from enterprises, especially private firms and corporate companies.

During the period, private firms provided 37.7 per cent of total employment chances, compared with 37 per cent from January to March.

Joint-stock companies offered 24.2 per cent of the total posts, 0.8 percentage points lower than in the first quarter.

In contrast, the proportion of job demands from State-owned enterprises rose by 0.8 percentage points to 10.8 per cent.

Institutions in China created only 1.2 per cent of the total job opportunities in the quarter.

The proportion of laid-off workers dropped by 0.4 percentage points on a quarterly basis, and it was 2 percentage points lower compared with the same period of 2003.

The ministry statistics show in 2003 there were about 24 million people looking for work in cities, including 6 million workers laid off from State-owned and collective enterprises, 8 million registered jobless, and about 10 million new job seekers such as college and technical school graduates.

However, although the job market is growing better year on year, supply of skilled workers at all technical levels fell short of market demand during the second quarter, statistics from the 113 major cities show.

The job/candidate ratios for senior technicians, senior engineers, and technicians were 2.39, 2.22 and 2.12 respectively.

This indicated that when there were more than 200 job opportunities in the market, only 100 candidates applied for posts.

The job/candidate ratio for skilled workers at all levels (except for engineers) all increased on a quarterly basis.

The ratio for senior technicians rose by 0.76 points over the first quarter of 2004.

And the growth was 0.43 points for the job/candidate ratio of senior engineers.

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