Over half of Nanjing’s new workforce are recent university graduates, after effects of industrial restructuring of Nanjing have taken hold.
According to the Department for Human Resources and Social Security of Nanjing, at the end of September 53.58 percent of new workforce had received tertiary education; an increase of 4.16 percentage points year on year. Thereby, the city has managed to reach their goal of a 3 percentage points increase for the year 2014 three months in advance, marking quite a successful year for the Ning.
Zhu Zhihong, head of Nanjing’s HR and Social Security Department, expressed his pleasure at Nanjing’s success in a statement to local media. “This year was the first time the municipal government introduced the target of increasing the proportion of staff with university level education by more than three percentage points.”
The promising prospects in terms of employment, better payment and more appealing opportunities of career advancement is attracting students from all surrounding areas; with Shanghai being a competitive hot bed and now placing 10th on Mercer’s 2014 most expensive cities (before London), Nanjing is offering a much more affordable outlook to workers in neighbouring provinces.
Nanjing, in return, welcomes the wanderers with open arms; this year’s staggering increase has been a result of an effort rolled out over the past few years by the city’s leadership. Their strategy has been to enable fresh graduates to easily enter major emerging industries in a bid to improve the overall quality of workers. Continued economic growth and the aforementioned favourable policies are at the base of the success as many companies currently find themselves on the look-out for highly-skilled, highly-educated workers.
With the end of September, the six emerging industries, which received strategic attention from the government have witnessed encouraging growth. The main business revenue from information technology, biotechnology, energy saving, high-end equipment manufacturing, new energy and new energy vehicles, increased by 16 percent. Software and information services, and e-commerce industries are not far behind, registering a growth rate of over 15 percent. These figures far exceed the growth rate of other traditional industries.
The most noteworthy development took place in outsourcing, where Nanjing’s volume grew more than 30 percent, employing up to 30.4 million locals. This represents an impressive increase of 3.4 million people, including 238,000 employees, or 78.1 percent, with university education.
The goal of the government is to promote higher quality employment in order to increase the income level and the overall quality of Nanjing.
“The figures show clearly that the policies have been effective and that industrial structural adjustment to optimize the structure of employment is the right approach,” summarized Zhu.
A rosy future lies ahead of the young workforce as 2015 is promising to be even more successful; it seems that now is the time to be a graduate in Jiangsu.
