In China, finding jobs for 6.3 million new college graduates a year creates a headache for university presidents and government officials as they grapple with slowing economic growth, a vast increase in enrollments, and sky-high expectations of the benefits a degree will bring.
Enter the campus employment-guidance center, a relatively new but rapidly growing service in China. Its growth is fueled by pressure from families and governments for universities to prove they are turning out employable graduates.
Nankai University, in Tianjin, a port city southeast of Beijing, has one of the more comprehensive employment-guidance centers. That may have to do with its location: Tianjin is an industrial base for global giants like Motorola and Airbus, as well as smaller high-tech and life-sciences companies.
The guidance office is housed inside the student-activities center. It employs seven people who spend their days updating an online job bank, organizing career fairs, providing one-on-one counseling, organizing panels, and providing workshops on topics such as résumé writing. They draw on the help of 20 or so other student counselors who work in academic departments.
On a recent day, students were milling around a job fair being held inside the student center, delivering résumés to recruiters. The fair is one of two events that day organized by Liu Yuebo, the guidance center’s director, a youthful-looking 37-year-old. Later on, he will participate in a panel giving tips on how to succeed on the fiercely competitive civil-service exam.
While the employment-guidance center is centrally located on the campus, contact with students mostly takes place through its Web site. An Yuemei, who is studying law and politics, checks it “every day, morning and evening.” She also casts her net wider by clicking on links to partner sites at other top universities—Peking University, Renmin University of China, and Tsinghua University.
“I look at the Web site a lot because it’s updated very quickly,” says a fellow politics major, Wang Jia, a third-year student with long hair and fashionably chunky glasses.
The staff posted 30,000 job ads from 2,600 companies in the final four months of 2011.
Employment counseling is a new phenomenon in China, emerging in the wake of market reforms. Until the late 1990s, university graduates were allocated jobs by the government. Suddenly a whole generation of youngsters had to fend for themselves, without the benefit of insight from parents or professors. A 150-percent increase in the college-educated population in the last decade compounded their challenges and piled on the pressure.
Watchdogs to Counselors
Universities responded by reforming the role of a cadre of fudao laoshi, or “guidance teachers,” who had been the Communist Party’s campus watchdogs. Mr. Liu was asked to create Nankai’s employment service in 2005. “When I started, it was tough,” he recalls. “There was great pressure from the university leaders.”
It remains challenging. The legacy of job allocation persists as students—many of them cosseted only children—frequently have “no conception of what a job or a career means,” says Wen Qinshan, human-resources director of Fesco, a staffing agency that recruits and manages 600,000 employees for roughly 10,000 foreign enterprises in Beijing.
A key part of Nankai’s strategy is to invite high-profile chief executives and their top lieutenants to judge student competitions that test résumé writing or interview skills, usually with half a dozen internships as prizes.
In one such contest, a real-estate firm’s human-resources director pushed contestants to “find faults in their résumés and attack the problems,” says Ji Fang, a career counselor based in the economics department. Both Ms. An and Ms. Wang flunked the first round of the competitions they entered but had no complaints.
In the contest, Maybelline executives asked teams to present a product. Ms. An was a team leader, taking her group past tough selection criteria to gain a place in the 25-team competition. The team quickly foundered.
“I was kicked out in the first round, but I thought it was very good,” she says. “The main lesson was, preparation is very important.”
Nankai, which has strong programs in economics, management studies, and law, with pioneering scientific research, also leverages its alumni network. The business school, for example, hosts frequent alumni dinners.
“We ask them if they are willing to bring in their HR department to do employment-recruitment exercises,” says Ma Ran, the school’s student-guidance counselor.
One result has been the “Young Alumni Salon,” where graduates with three to five years’ experience describe their jobs and how they got hired. Such talks “let students understand the challenges,” says Ms. Ma.
In a society where personal contacts are often the route to employment, students see the alumni network as especially effective. It has worked for Zhu Weimin, a management major who has a job offer from a branch of Huaneng Group, a prestigious state-run electric company, after a graduate from his province contacted Nankai to recruit.
Career centers here tend to model themselves on the best practices at elite Chinese universities. Tsinghua University runs several training sessions each year for 25 universities in less-developed Xinjiang Province, in China’s far west.
Contact with career-services programs in the United States has been instructive but plays a lesser role, says Jin Leili, a Tsinghua career counselor. The American emphasis on one-to-one counseling impresses her, though she doubts its relevance for China’s vast population. “Career courses are the main channel for us to deliver our career services,” she says.
The investment that some Chinese universities are making in career services seems to be paying off. In big cities like Tianjin and Beijing, near-universal career-guidance training has improved students’ awareness and decision-making skills, says Mr. Wen, Fesco’s human-resources director. Though, he adds, “They don’t do enough.”
College advisers are also seeing their profession grow in stature. Song Yuan, who works in Nankai’s employment-guidance center, says news-media coverage of graduate joblessness has changed her friends’ views of her work. “When I started, they didn’t understand what I was doing. They said, ‘Your major is in economics. You can earn more,’” she says. “Now they think it’s beneficial and stable.”
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