Graduates may fail Chinese economy
A shortage of well-trained graduates could hinder the growth of the Chinese economy and prevent it from developing more sophisticated industries, according to a report by consultants McKinsey.
A lack of practical skills and poor English-speaking levels will make it hard for China to develop service-based industries such as the sort of information technology outsourcing that India has specialised in over the past decade, it says.
The study underlines the difficulties China faces in trying to shift from an economy dominated by manufacturing into services and research-based industries, despite the large number of new graduates that the country is producing.
McKinsey also predicts that multinationals will have an increasingly hard time recruiting high-quality staff in China at a time when growing numbers of foreign companies are expanding their operations there.
"It is a paradox of shortage among plenty," said Andrew Grant, director in McKinsey's Shanghai office and one of the report's authors. "Few of China's vast numbers of graduates are capable of working successfully in the services-export sector."
The report is based on interviews with 83 human resources executives who concluded that fewer than 10 per cent of graduates in China had the skills to work for a foreign company, compared with 25 per cent of graduates in India.
China will produce 3.1m university graduates this year compared with 1.3m in the US. However, he said the type of education many Chinese students received did not give them the practical and team-work skills that global companies needed.
"The universities have a theoretical, text-book, fact-based, learn-from-the-master approach," he said. English teaching also had insufficient emphasis on conversational skills.
According to McKinsey, China produces about 600,000 new engineers every year, nine times as many as the US. However, of the pool of 1.6m young engineers in the country, only about 160,000 have the practical and language skills to work for a multinational.
Not only are there fewer graduates available to multinationals than many companies realise, but they also face fierce competition for them from local companies, given the strong expansion of the Chinese economy.
In a decade, China would need 75,000 managers with some form of global experience, the study said. It currently has only about 5,000 such people.
Mr Grant said China had to improve the "connective tissue" between universities and industry so graduates were taught the skills companies required.
"China needs to develop a deliberate strategy on this issue," he said.
Similar sentiments were voiced in a meeting last month between S. Ramadorai, chief executive of Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest IT company, and Professor Yunhe Pan, president of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, a second-tier city whose lower costs are attracting potential Indian IT investment.
Mr Ramadorai told his host that TCS would send some of its Chinese staff in Hangzhou for training in India. He said TCS could also help design college courses to make graduates more employable in IT.
Yet as TCS and other Indian IT companies are discovering as they develop local centres to service global customers, market access in China may add up to nothing if the country's graduate and post-graduate community of software professionals lacks proficiency in English.
India's greater comfort with English will set it apart from its rival in their respective technology ambitions. China has not disguised its admiration of India's low-cost, export-dominated IT industry, which in a decade has emerged as the world's largest offshore outsourcing centre.
“中国高素质大学生短缺 有碍经济增长”
咨询公司麦肯锡(McKinsey)的一份报告称，中国缺乏训练有素的毕业生，这可能阻碍中国的经济增长以及发展更先进的产业。
报告表示，如果中国缺乏应用技能，英语水平低下，那么中国将更难以发展服务产业，比方像印度信息技术外包业，在过去10年里，印度一直在专门从事这一产业。
这一研究突出表明，中国在努力从以制造业主导的经济，向服务和研究产业转变的过程中，面临种种困难，尽管中国目前毕业新生数量巨大。麦肯锡还预测，跨国公司在华招聘高质量员工将面临更多困难，因为目前有越来越多的外资企业在华扩张业务。
“一方面是短缺，一方面是丰富，这是个自相矛盾的问题，”麦肯锡上海办事处负责人、报告作者之一高安德(Andrew Grant)表示，“中国的毕业生人数很多，但很少有能力胜任服务出口业的工作。”
该报告基于对83位人力资源高管的访谈，这些人士认为，中国毕业生中只有不到10%拥有为外企工作的技能，而相比之下，印度的该比例则达到25%。中国今年将有310万大学毕业生，美国则为130万。
但他表示，许多中国学生所接受的那种教育，没有教给他们为全球企业工作所需的实用和团队协作技能。
“大学采用的是基于理论的、教科书的、事实的、导师传授的教育方式，”他表示。英语教学对交谈技能的重视也不足。
据麦肯锡称，中国每年新培养出约60万名工程师，是美国的9倍。然而，在中国160万名年轻工程师中，只有约16万名具备为跨国公司工作所需的实用技能和语言技能。能为跨国企业工作的大学毕业生人数比许多企业意识到的要少，而且由于中国经济强劲扩张，这些企业也面临中国本土企业争夺毕业生的激烈竞争。
该研究报告称，10年后，中国将需要7.5万名具备某种国际经验的经理人。中国目前仅有约5000名此类人才。
印度掌握英语的程度更高，这一点将使印度比其竞争对手中国在实现技术雄心上更胜一筹。中国没有掩饰对印度低成本、出口主导型信息技术产业的羡慕。印度已成为全球最大的离岸外包中心。
