OPINION> Commentary
Be pragmatic in looking for jobs
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-01-22 07:45

To ease college students' difficulties in finding jobs, we must guide them to change their outdated ideas about finding posts that perfectly fit their majors, says an article in Jiefang Daily. The following is an excerpt:

A model college graduate has recently described his experience of finding a job after graduation. As he said, he had to return to his hometown after failing to find a job that perfectly fitted his major of computer science. Instead, he joined a pig-raising farm and with the expansion of the farm, he designed a computer program for it to gain more information on the pig market and expand sales.

His experience shows that college graduates don't need to find jobs that can totally fit their majors. As long as they can take their majors as "academic background", they will definitely get opportunities to use the majors at work.

The global financial crisis has already affected the job market in China. College students must realize that they can work for every type of posts and it is not necessary for them to limit their working opportunities only to areas where their majors fit the posts. As long as they can find a job, they can work well with the aid of their academic background.

The difficulty of finding jobs for college students does not mean there are too many college students. The percentage of employees with the college degree in China is still low, only one-eighth of that of developed countries. The difficulty to a large degree lies in the traditional mindset in terms of finding jobs. If they can upgrade their understanding of majors and only regard majors as academic background, it would help them regain confidence and courage.

To help them change their conventional mindsets about finding jobs, we must ensure that the guidance is practical and can be easily accepted by them. For example, we may guide students who study sociology as a major to work in the community office instead of entering a research institute, and tell them that they can use their knowledge of sociology to work better for the neighborhood.

(China Daily 01/22/2009 page8)