Grads find job-hopping is not a career-stopper

By Nie Xin  |   2008-6-23  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

FOR fresh graduates, China's fluid and fiercely competitive job market is like the Wild West. It's full of job-hoppers, headhunters, poachers and the lure of lucre, writes Nie Xin.

Sammy Yang has had five jobs since 2000. The 28-year-old administrative as-sistant in a foreign-invested company says change is easy. She quit because the work was tiring, boring, the pay wasn't commensurate with her efforts, and she didn't like the office politics.

"I will definitely leave if I feel unhappy where I work," says job-hopper Yang, whose latest company specializes in intellectual property protection. The college grad has moved up in salary over the years and now earns 4,000 yuan (US$580).

It doesn't take much to trigger a move to greener pastures. She's a tiao cao or job-hopping (literally hop/jump to another stable) manic. She's also quite typical; two or three jobs in two or three years since college is common, and some people leave their first job after just two or three months.

This is fast-developing China and it's not your granddad, or your dad's career path. This year 5.59 million grads enter the market. Job-hopping seems crazy given the odds, but there are a lot of risk-takers.

"I can't stand it when my pay and my hard work are out of balance, especially if the work is tiring," says Yang.

It is a kind of miracle if those born in the 1980s stay in a company for five years, says a major survey on turnover by www.51job, one of China's biggest job-hunting Web portals.

The survey covered companies representing 2 million employees in 26 Chinese cities. It found turnover is highest in the second or third year of a working career, as young people try to find a good job fit.

And people are very picky about the right fit. Just about anything is reason to walk these days. This makes some observers say today's single-child workforce is "spoiled, flighty, lazy, impatient, unrealistic and disloyal."