South-Central China’s Largest Job Readiness Training Center Built in Changsha
Hunan Service Outsourcing Personnel Development Alliance
On October 22, Ambow celebrated the opening of the Ambow South-Central China Job Readiness Center and the creation of the Service Outsourcing Personnel Development Alliance at the Changsha Sheraton. The Ambow South-Central China Job Readiness Center will be operated by Chansgha’s Niu’er College of Software Education, and is the largest software training center in South-Central China. The celebration was an important moment for the training center as well as the overall development of Hunan’s service outsourcing industry.
A newly developing industry addresses a bottleneck in talent
Lately, “service outsourcing” has been an important term for Changsha’s economic development. This is not only because Changsha has been dubbed “China’s service outsourcing trial city”, but also because it has been successful at spurring development. If it was not a successful project and concept, it would have been dropped already; as the Chinese saying goes “Move forward or you will be left behind.”
The service outsourcing industry is a typical “two brain” industry, combining both human talent and computers, but the most important factor is still the development of human capital. In 2008, Changsha’s newly developed service outsourcing industry surpassed historical benchmarks, but even this rapid growth in service outsourcing talent has been unable to fulfill the massive outsourcing market demand. “The population of talent that is ready to be utilized right now is still too small,” sighed iSoftstone Changsha General Manager Wang Youliang. Although Changsha has a large amount of IT graduates every year, the majority of them still don’t meet the qualifications of many companies. “Their hardware and software skills are not up to par, and their language skills, customer service skills, practical experience, problem solving capabilities, and project management abilities are all far below enterprise average standards. Companies’ biggest problem is that they can’t even use the employees they hire!”
University graduates face an employment crisis
However, the most obvious example of the current talent deficit can be seen by looking at graduation and employment numbers: there were 6.1 million college graduates in 2009, 520,000 more than the previous year, and currently over 2 million of them are still unemployed.
“In college, the students study too much theory, only to find out when they are applying for jobs that they have no practical skills. I’ve already submitted several hundred resumes but haven’t gotten any responses, and my classmate told me that companies won’t even consider hiring a graduate student without any kind of practical experience.” Zhou Fen, a current student at Chansgha’s Niu’er College of Software Education, told a reporter. Looking for any opportunities, she and her family searched everywhere and eventually came across Niu’er College in a local newspaper. After doing some research, she decided to give up studying for other college entrance exams and instead attend Niu’er.
The Ministry of Education Career Center Employment Development Deputy Chief An Kang explained that IT personnel do not just need theoretical knowledge, but also require specific technical skills as well as other practical skills such as the ability to synthesize new information and fit in with corporate culture. Practical IT training courses can help bridge the gap between company’s high requirements for new employees and other less effective forms of personnel training, thus creating a complete, smooth education value chain. National Senior Career Director and Ambow Changsha Niu’er General Manager Zhao Jingfang explained that the main reason for such a high unemployment rate among college graduates is because their lack of practical training and internship experience makes them not competitive. It is incredibly difficult to find high quality practical training centers, so students are not very employable.