Facing geopolitical strife and tech‑economic change, fresh graduates struggle to land initial positions and gain a footing. Li Bingcun explores their journey to gain a stable start. 

Editor’s note: Employment is a vital social issue that is shaped by broader economic conditions. In a three-part series, China Daily looks at the challenges facing graduates, manual workers and skilled professionals struggling to keep their heads above water amid the threat from artificial intelligence and robotics. The first part focuses on young job seekers fighting their way into the workforce as career paths dwindle.

At a recent job fair in Shenzhen, fresh graduate Xie Xiaofang got a taste of what’s in store. She had banked on landing a job that could pay up to 6,000 yuan ($894) a month in the Pearl River Delta — one of the country’s most economically developed regions — but found it was not a walk in the park.

Xie, who was born in Inner Mongolia autonomous region in northern China, went to college in Hainan province, and recently moved to Shenzhen, desperate to find her first job in the vibrant southern China boomtown and establish a foothold there.

Xie says she submitted around 700 resumes to potential employers. But although she had won a national scholarship and interned at several companies, she is still having a hard time getting a satisfactory job with an average salary in the first-tier city.

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Campus job recruitment for this year’s graduates has largely wrapped up and early recruitment for next year’s graduates has begun. The window of opportunity is closing fast.

A career coach at the job fair said human resource professionals spend just a few seconds to complete initial screening of resumes, meaning candidates must find a way to outshine potentially thousands of competitors.

Tightening market

With the dual hurdles of economic transformation and the AI revolution, graduates like Xie find themselves entangled in an overcrowded job market, coupled with fastidious employers and a mismatch of knowledge and market needs.

Grim figures project that the number of university graduates on the Chinese mainland will hit 12.7 million this year — more than the population of Hainan province and a rise of 480,000 from 2025, marking the 11th consecutive year of growth. Conversely, the number of jobs available in the market has lagged significantly behind a ballooning population of jobseekers.

The “2026 Campus Recruitment White Paper” issued in July by job recruitment platform 51Job shows that 23.3 percent of this year’s graduates on the mainland had not been invited to a job interview, with nearly a quarter of companies explicitly reducing the scale of their campus recruitment efforts.

The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, as the region with the strongest talent magnetism in the country, has borne the brunt of the nation’s employment pressures.

The scaling down of leading internet firms amid industry transformation and a decline in foreign trade-related hiring demand due to geopolitical tensions are indirectly shrinking the region’s job opportunities for graduates. The innovation cluster’s heavy reliance on AI adoption is dealing a particularly severe blow to entry-level administrative positions, according to Shen Minghao, vice-president of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies and also an advisory expert at the State Council’s former leading group on employment.

The pace of industrial transformation is also outpacing that of educational reform. The Greater Bay Area is transitioning from the “world’s factory” to a hub of innovation. Industries like electronics and information technology, new energy and biopharmaceuticals are facing a critical dearth of talent, coupled with a glut of graduates in business, economics and the humanities, creating a severe imbalance in the labor market.

Hong Kong, a traditional magnet for global talent, has not escaped unscathed either. The number of full-time job vacancies suitable for university graduates in the special administrative region sunk from 80,000 in 2022 to about 31,000 last year — a sharp fall of more than 60 percent over three years and the lowest in a decade.

The magnitude of the problem has even driven some morale-battered youngsters to seek divine intervention by showing up at popular places of worship, such as Man Mo Temple and the famous Wong Tai Sin Temple.

Agnes Lam, who graduated from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2023, having majored in global business, says that in the first few years following the COVID-19 pandemic when the local economy was just beginning to recover, good job opportunities at major enterprises were still up for grabs. She was therefore able to join the global fashion group Louis Vuitton as a team manager. Now, high-quality internship programs like this are becoming increasingly difficult to find, and some have even been canceled.

Pragmatic choices

Advice for job seekers on enhancing core competitiveness is often vague and many young people have adopted a pragmatic and agile approach to trying to find career opportunities.

Lam says some of her younger peers are no longer fixated on joining glamorous big names in Hong Kong’s pillar industries, but are instead looking to new job offers at technology startups. She says that while traditionally many graduates preferred to jump straight into the workforce to build up practical skills, an increasing number are now choosing to pursue a master’s degree in a different field to add to their skillset.

Another graduate, Chen Yangyang, says she believes the market could only worsen if she were to pursue further studies. A month after graduating in June, she joined a small cross-border e-commerce company in Shenzhen working in brand risk management. Given the limited room for growth, she aims to seek greener pastures during the upcoming autumn job recruitment season.

To avoid being placed at a disadvantage after graduation, Eric Zhang Zhiyao decided to be proactive. Two weeks after taking up a master’s course at Hong Kong Polytechnic University on Aug 1, he began attending job fairs seeking internship opportunities.

Zhang says the accounting sector’s stability has attracted many people to take it up as a career but the industry’s low mobility has led to jobs being created at a slow pace. Despite increasingly fierce competition, Zhang does not want to waste what he has learned and plans to step up his efforts in online applications.

James Zhang Liao, who is studying data analytics at a top-30 university in the United States, says he has applied for multiple jobs across various regions instead of pinning his hopes on a particular market. Zhang, who is due to graduate in November, intends to seek employment in the US, the HKSAR and on the Chinese mainland.

He is looking for a “well-structured platform” company for his first job, and says Hong Kong is a good place to leverage his advantage of having experienced Chinese and Western cultures.

Building the future

In an environment that favors mature individuals who can quickly adapt to the job, graduates are facing a shrinking window of opportunity to turn their knowledge into experience. If the steppingstone for building industry knowledge and judgment is removed, climbing up the career ladder can be extremely difficult, Shen warns.

Describing youth employment as the cornerstone of macroeconomic stability, he cautions that difficulties in finding employment could lead to long-term income losses, a decline in skills and an erosion of social confidence among the younger generation.

The industry expert cites the classic “scarring effect” theory in labor economics that when workers enter the market in an economic recession, the negative impact they experience initially might affect their entire career.

“As a leading testing ground for innovation in the country, the Greater Bay Area has both the capacity and the responsibility to take the lead in exploring a Chinese solution for youth employment in the AI era. Ensuring the stability of graduating classes in recent years means securing the foundation for China’s innovation over the next decades,” says Shen.

To address the situation, self-help and external help are equally important. Tam Kar-yan, vice-president for administration and business at HKUST, says he believes the current decline in entry-level positions is primarily due to macroeconomic factors as the application of AI at the corporate level is still in its infancy. Once the technology is widely integrated into corporate workflows, the impact could become even more apparent.

In his view, job market transformation driven by AI is imminent. Although Hong Kong’s AI adoption rate is far higher than the global average, 60 percent of the city’s employees have never had any AI-related training. In particular, there is a lack of proficiency in advanced AI tools, according to a survey conducted by his team earlier this year, which is one of the largest recent studies on AI’s impact on Hong Kong workplaces.

Tam urges the community to redouble its efforts in promoting AI literacy by integrating it into education across all disciplines, while encouraging students to sharpen human skills that AI cannot easily replace, such as critical thinking, complex problem-solving, interpersonal communication, and ethical decision-making.

Liu Jun, a national-level senior vocational trainer who has provided career guidance to 50,000 employees and students, highlights young people’s valuable creativity, courage to innovate, and ability to learn quickly, which she described as scarce assets in the AI age.  

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She advises graduates to “join the market first, and then iterate”, as practical skills can only be quickly acquired in a real-world environment.

Regarding helping graduates gain useful knowledge and experience as a first priority, Shen hopes policymakers can track the changes in labor-market entry at an earlier stage, while strengthening oversight of the quality of employment and internships.

Based on industry demand, schools should evaluate enrollment quotas and curriculum offerings annually, and phase out programs whose employment rates fall below an agreed threshold for three consecutive years, he suggests. For small and medium-sized enterprises, he proposes that industry associations explore a shared management trainee model to share costs and the talent pool.

As society moves on, the younger generation who have yet to get started are left in fear of falling behind. Shen says he believes the community should do everything in its power to help them mature faster, rather than denying them the prospects to grow.

Contact the writer at bingcun@chinadailyhk.com