China desperately needs more skilled workers, but vocational education is lacking, as is public understanding of blue-collar jobs
　　
　　LEARNING ON THE JOB: Interns from a vocational school in Liuzhou, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, are taught to operate lathes
　　In late August, with enrollment work nearly completed, universities in China reported an overwhelming number of incoming students for this school year. Vocational schools, meanwhile, were once again short of new students and struggling to survive.
　　“Vocational education is a tough business,” said a teacher surnamed Zeng, in charge of student enrollment at Jiangxi Modern College. Zeng, who wouldn’t give his first name, said that in order to attract more new students, the college has had to try such tactics as offering tuition reductions if students register before a given date, an approach rarely seen at regular universities.
　　While there is a boom in university enrollment, there is also a tough job market, making it very difficult for many new graduates of Chinese universities to find jobs. In contrast, the demand for skilled workers is only growing. In 2005 there was a “skilled worker crisis” in south China’s coastal areas, where manufacturing is flourishing. The crisis spread across the nation and has even affected the traditional industrial bases in the northeast.
　　The crisis is continuing and in some regions the salary of a senior skilled laborer now exceeds that of a white-collar worker by a significant margin. Yet so far, that hasn’t translated into more people entering trade schools to take up these positions.
　　China has a total of 87 million skilled workers, of which only 3.6 million, or 4 percent, are senior skilled workers, according to figures from the Ministry of Labor and Social Security. In the manufacturing-dominated province of Zhejiang, the ratio of supply to demand of machinery assembly workers, welders and milling machine workers is 1:7, 1:8 and 1:21, respectively.
　　At the same time, technicians are relatively old, with more than 40 percent above the age of 46. Many companies are suffering a temporary worker shortage as highly skilled staff are retiring and there aren’t enough replacements. The shortage is hitting such industries as manufacturing, architecture, energy, environmental protection and aerospace.
　　After looking into the skilled worker situation in Beijing, Guo Peiyuan, Vice-Principal of the School of Information, Beijing Technology & Business University, warned that China might have to employ foreign technicians to repair the Imperial Palace if the government doesn’t find a way to improve vocational education. China’s vocational education system is “on the fringe and very weak,” he said.
　　At a recent forum of university presidents in Chengdu, Vice President of Peking University Hai Wen said he thinks Chinese universities, not just trade schools, should train skilled workers. According to an article in China Youth Daily, Hai said that while universities focus on teaching theory, they don’t train the highly skilled workers essential to a newly industrialized China. 　　However, the public bias against such jobs is pervasive.省略, one of the country’s leading portal sites, only 31 percent of netizens who took the poll supported Hai in his view that universities should train skilled workers, leading to these workers being more highly skilled and having the same status as white-collar workers.
　　
　　An education scorned
　　
　　AN EDUCATION THAT WORKS: An autoworker who graduated from a vocational school in Anhui Province examines a car part on the production line. Poor public perception of blue-collar jobs has led to a worker shortage
　　A survey recently conducted in Beijing on how the public views vocational education revealed that most parents misunderstand it. For “the No.1 choice of higher education for children,” 80 percent of the parents surveyed chose “regular universities or colleges.” More than 75 percent said they wouldn’t encourage their children to attend vocational schools even if their kids are willing and would enjoy learning a skilled trade. As for the reasons why parents refuse vocational schools, more than half said they think that “only kids who are poor at school work choose to go to vocational schools,” and another 30 percent said they are afraid that “kids can’t stand the heavy work on the front lines of production”.
　　In similar surveys in the cities of Shanghai, Nanjing and Wuhan, 65 percent of parents said they consider vocational education to be inferior to regular higher education, and about 53 percent said they look down on vocational education when they talk about careers with their kids.
　　In a survey conducted in Hainan Province, more than half of respondents said they think that vocational education goes only a little way and only 20 percent choose to attend vocational schools, the majority of which made such a choice on the grounds that they felt they weren’t doing well enough to attend university or couldn’t afford the tuition fees. The cost for a vocational education is about half that of attending university.
　　“The employment conditions are good for the students who graduate from vocational schools and the wages of skilled workers are rising, but it’s not deemed to be a decent profession,” said a parent whose child just entered a trade school.
　　Prejudice towards vocational education has some objective causes. Recently, with the rising demand for skilled workers, vocational schools have sprung up like mushrooms, though the new ones are largely of poor quality.
　　The problems at these upstart schools are reportedly many: the number of teachers per capita doesn’t live up to the national standard, and infrastructure and facilities are outdated, making it hard to train students into highly skilled workers. There are media reports of students graduating from these poor-quality schools without mastering any practical skills, having wasted their time with online chatting and computer games.
　　An effective vocational education system hasn’t been established, and vocational education isn’t meeting the needs of the marketplace because information about these needs isn’t passing smoothly between schools and employers. 　　As a result, short-term skill training classes are hot these days. Classes are less time-consuming, more effective, and most importantly, able to roll with the needs of the market. Trainees can quickly be put into use after they finish their training courses. In comparison, vocational schools usually take three years and when students finished school they sometimes find that what they have learned is already out of date.
　　What’s worse, many government departments see vocational education as a burden, and some cities don’t invest a penny in it. Neither do private investors have any interests in vocational education. With little help from outside, the teaching of the trades is facing a tough road.
　　
　　Vocational education reforms
　　
　　China made developing vocational education an important part of the country’s education reform in 1980. As a result, some high schools were changed into vocational schools, and some work units, or danwei---the structure for organizing China’s workforce---were requested to help run these schools. So, most students had job opportunities when they graduated, and during this period, vocational education flourished.
　　But with the deepening of reform of state-owned enterprises, starting in the mid-1990s, mass layoffs began to take place. Vocational graduates couldn’t be allocated jobs, and as a result enrollment at vocational schools began to face hard times. Vocational education needed to adjust to the labor market, an inevitable outcome of the transformation in China from planned economy to market economy.
　　Faced with this predicament, local educational departments worked out multiple countermeasures, one of which was to assist students studying to be skilled workers in pursuing higher-level vocational education. As a result, many students chose to attend vocational schools because they could continue with senior vocational schools for further study. Therefore, junior vocational education remained stable during this period.
　　In 2004, China’s State Council made an overall plan about the development of vocational education, integrating it into the country’s overall reform and economic development. At present, vocational education is taking on more social responsibility, as it is considered a good way to train migrant workers who have come to seek jobs in the big cities. Vocational education is stepping into a new phase.
　　
　　Tweaking the system
　　
　　International experience shows that developing a vocational education system is a strategic move to boost the economy and strengthen state power in both developed and burgeoning industrial countries, when their societies have evolved to a certain stage.
　　Thus China included the cultivation of highly skilled workers in the country’s plan to build a talented labor pool, for the first time in December 2003, the same year the Chinese Ministry of Labor and Social Security launched a scheme to train 500,000 technicians in three years. China will allocate 10 billion yuan in vocational education, and by 2010 the junior vocational education system will enroll 8 million students, equaling the number of junior high schools students, according to the 11th Five-Year Plan. 　　Chinese Education Minister Zhou Ji said that boosting vocational education, and in particular enlarging the enrollment of junior vocational students, will be the important objective of education reform during the government’s plan.
　　In June 2006, the government issued a document to emphasize the importance of developing talented skilled workers. The document said that high-quality workers should comprise more than 25 percent of all skilled workers by 2010, and the proportion of high, medium and basic level of skilled workers should match that of most moderately developed countries by 2020.
　　However, many experts think it’s more important to lift the social status of skilled workers than it is to solve the employment of vocational students and increase their wages.
　　In response, some companies are already taking steps. At China FAW Group Corp., the country’s leading auto maker, 538 technicians have been promoted to the positions of senior manager and secondary manager, and six senior blue-collar workers have been provided service cars by the company.

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