College students' employment is difficult to "docking" smoothly

A few days ago, the "2013 Survey Report on Employment Stress of Chinese College Students" was released. The survey shows that this year is the most stressful year for college students in the past four years. The average expected monthly salary has dropped from 4,592.5 yuan last year to 3,683.6 yuan, a decrease of 3,683.6 yuan. Nearly a thousand dollars. Personnel increase, job reduction and salary reduction have become the new pronouns for employment in 2013. The summer of 2013 became the "hardest employment season in history" for Chinese graduates.

Facing the concerns of China's top leaders about this phenomenon, and the worries of ordinary people about the employment situation, there are two "interesting" phenomena that deserve attention. On the one hand, people criticize the college entrance examination while scolding the expansion of enrollment, trying to trace the history and institutional origins of the problem of employment difficulties; on the other hand, while college students are facing difficulties in finding jobs, recruiters also have the same problem of "can't recruit people".

Why is the employment problem of college students so prominent? Why does the phenomenon of "difficulty in recruiting and employment" coexist? Is it a system issue or a job-seeking mentality issue? Is it a problem of concept, or a problem of connection?

From a macro perspective, the global economic downturn is a background for employment difficulties factor.

Due to the slowdown in economic growth, the total number of graduates has increased, and structural contradictions have become prominent, which has fundamentally led to the employment difficulties of graduates. In the post-financial crisis era, the reorganization and adjustment of domestic and foreign industries have undergone great changes. In the first quarter of 2012, my country's gross domestic product increased by 8.1% year-on-year, and in the first quarter of this year, it fell to 7.7%. The downward pressure on the macro economy and the adjustment of industrial structure brought about a decline in demand, and economic growth and employment growth showed a "counter-cyclical".

At the same time, my country's industries are still at the low end of the value chain, and the tertiary industry's ability to absorb college students' employment has limited growth. The contradiction between the limited social absorptive capacity and the large increase in the number of college graduates makes fresh college graduates face unprecedented challenges.

At the social level, my country's urban-rural dual structure has led to the division of the labor market into a dual structure. The extreme imbalance in factors such as development opportunities, welfare security, medical care, pension insurance, and children's education has led to a structural imbalance in the employment of college graduates. Structural contradictions are prominent in the choice of industry, region, enterprise scale and ownership of the employed population of college students. In the current market economy system, the reform of the labor market is not complete, and the market signals are seriously distorted. During the implementation of some policies to encourage employment and entrepreneurship of college students, there is still a phenomenon of "shelves", which also affects the employment of college graduates.

From a detailed point of view, the key roles of fresh graduates' employment—students, schools, and employers—have been misaligned. This misalignment is not only due to ideas, mentality, but also technical and traditional aspects. reason.

As for students, due to their high expectations for work, when the salary is lower than expected or the city is not ideal, graduates are often reluctant to "give in" and choose to go on to graduate school or take the civil service examination; for schools, their The direction of cultivating college students and the content that college students should learn are out of touch with the actual needs of society. The teaching content is not suitable for employment, and the professional setting is not reasonable, which is out of the market demand. Some schools are still enrolling students in pursuit of enrollment rates . This is also why the large-scale expansion of enrollment has been accused of being a major cause of employment difficulties.

The number of college graduates has risen, but the number of jobs available in the market, especially the proportion of "white-collar" jobs that college students are fascinated by, is stable. This has resulted in a demand imbalance in the job market. Coupled with the unreasonable mentality of students, the difficulty of finding employment has accumulated to today's predicament.

In society, in order to save training costs, employers put too much emphasis on practical work experience, hoping to bring maximum benefits. And fresh college graduates, lack of work experience is almost an inevitable phenomenon. Employers ignore the potential and plasticity of college students, and use "experience" to set a high threshold, not to mention the obstacles caused by gender discrimination and household registration discrimination to the employment of new students.

The industry also believes that among the multiple reasons that lead to "difficulty in employment", in addition to environmental reasons such as the expansion of college enrollment, a large base of employed people, and the saturation of supply and demand for some positions, job seekers themselves have unclear career plans, impetuous personalities, and blind comparisons , intolerance is also an important reason.

Ding Dajian, a professor at Renmin University of China, said that the expansion of university enrollment over the years is one of the reasons why graduates find it difficult to find jobs. Ding Dajian is also paying close attention to labor issues. Ding Dajian said that the difficulty in finding employment for college students is not a sudden thing, it has been accumulated for more than ten years. Years of continuous enrollment expansion have brought the total supply to a very high level, and now the slowdown in economic growth has highlighted the difficulty of graduate employment.

What's more cruel than the reality of employment is that at the same time when college students can't find jobs, there are still some minors who "struggle" on the road to becoming college students.

As more and more students begin to question the value of going to college, they are making various attempts to explore another "path". Some of them are tragic, others are postmodern. Last month, media reported that a high school student in Henan Province hired a murderer to kill his father and sister. The motive was that "they were too strict with their studies." He committed suicide because he did not finish his homework during the holidays; another teenager in Nanjing got up at 4 am to do his homework on the day he returned to school, but his parents later found him hanging himself in the stairway of his home.

This tragic situation does not stop at the college entrance examination. Media reports last month that two young men in their early twenties in southern China died suddenly after working too much overtime were unfortunately not uncommon. Xinhua News Agency reported last week that 40 college graduates who were looking for jobs had shared a 130-square-meter apartment in Beijing, and had toiled around the city without finding a job.

Years of hard work have brought education into the homes of ordinary people, but China, which has stepped out of the "elite education" system, has still not been able to get rid of the "elite" consciousness. From the moment of admission, students' tasks are assigned high scores and high rankings, but few educators guide students to understand the meaning and extension of scores.

To solve employment difficulties, in addition to relying on the country's economic development and proper guidance by the government, it is more practical. The way people can do it is to let students really understand where education, especially higher education, is the focus. University is the closest place to the society in the "ivory tower". College students need to understand their own needs and the needs of the society. , emotions, especially effective work ability to enter the workplace, can better fill the market demand, build "work" according to aptitude, and cool down the summer that is more irritable because employment is too difficult.