The air is heavy with humidity on a summertime Saturday, yet the young men and women crowded in a hotel ballroom here in China’s capital are wearing jackets and ties, heels and pantyhose.
They are here for a daylong job fair and career seminar organized by a half-dozen American universities for their recent graduates. Some 800 job-hunting alumni have turned out; 1,200 more attended a similar event a week earlier in Shanghai.
Among the 50 employers present are multinational corporations like Bloomberg and Apple, and Chinese companies like Panda Financial and Hainan Airlines. The longest lines, snaking back on themselves two or three times, are to interview with the local offices of global financial-services firms including Ernst & Young and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Olivia Zhao, who is studying finance at the University of Southern California, one of the fair’s sponsors, is waiting in the Ernst & Young queue. She won’t graduate until the following May, but she is starting her search early. When she returns to California, she explains, “I won’t have the opportunity to connect with Chinese recruiters. I want to find a job without having a gap.”
In recent years, Chinese students like Ms. Zhao have poured onto American campuses at record numbers. Now they’re pouring out, degrees in hand, at never-before-seen rates and looking to their alma maters to help them land jobs, whether in the United States or back home. The problem is that many colleges are ill-equipped to help Chinese graduates navigate either American regulations for foreign workers or China’s raucous job market.
But some are becoming more adept — by necessity.
Phoebe You runs Ohio State University’s China Gateway office, in Shanghai. When the liaison office opened, seven years ago, much of its work focused on supporting faculty research and travel, building relationships with Chinese universities, and aiding with student recruitment. Increasingly, though, she and her colleagues have been hearing from alumni, anxious about finding jobs and looking for networking assistance.
Ms. You, who helped put together the career fair, knows well that the transition from an American education to the Chinese workplace isn’t always smooth. She earned a graduate degree from Ohio State before returning home to China.
Being on the ground in China, she feels well positioned to help make connections with local employers that can be difficult to forge a dozen times zones away. In addition to the job fair, Ohio State’s China office has set up an internship program to give students a taste of working in China.
While Ms. You came to adopt some career-advising duties, they are part of Tony Lei Tong’s official job description as associate director of employer and alumni relations for the New York Institute of Technology. In fact, the Shanghai-based Mr. Tong is not part of the international team at the institute, which offers joint degrees with several Chinese universities, but reports to the career-services office.
He has been in his job for four years and says he has only gotten busier as more graduates have returned to China. He tries to start working with students at the institute long before graduation, helping them find internships and job placements, in the United States and in China, to bulk up their résumés.
While Mr. Tong’s focus is on what happens to students after they earn a degree, he sees his work as critical to his university’s success in recruiting top-quality Chinese students. Chinese families are practical and want to know there will be a payoff to an expensive American degree, he says. “You risk hurting your university’s reputation if you don’t invest in international career services.”
At the University of Vermont, Kimberly Ead tries to manage those expectations early, talking with incoming students and their families about the challenges of an international job hunt. She holds workshops throughout the academic year.
Ms. Ead is based in Burlington, but her scope is global. Right now, for example, she is putting together a summertime job-shadowing program that will involve 28 alumni in 12 countries. Last year she did a pilot version, focused solely on China, home country of the bulk of Vermont’s 830 international students. The program paired a dozen students and alumni.
Ms. Ead, who became the university’s international-student career counselor three years ago, laughingly calls herself a stalker, noting that she has emailed roughly 1,200 Vermont graduates overseas as she builds an international alumni and career network.
Closer to home, she has cold-called local employers with offices abroad to encourage them to hire international students for short-term postgraduate work on a program known as optional practical training. One employer has hired a recent graduate on the temporary training program with a promise of a full-time job in its Shanghai branch if the graduate is a good fit.
Ms. Ead acknowledges that such connections may be easier to forge in Vermont, where there are only a handful of colleges and relatively few large employers.
Still, she has to make the case — one she strongly believes — that students with international and cross-cultural experience offer a “value add” to employers. Like Mr. Tong, she sees her work building alumni and employer connections as a valuable part of students’ educational experience. “When you’re paying for college,” she says, “you’re paying for the network.”
Karin Fischer writes about international education, colleges and the economy, and other issues. She’s on Twitter @karinfischer, and her email address is karin.fischer@chronicle.com.
