By Thursday evening, an estimated 1.3 million people will have signed up to take China’s annual civil service exams. Yet some job positions have found no applicants at all, even though unemployment among university graduates is rising.
On average, 50 applicants will compete for each “iron rice bowl” job in China's civil service, promising less pay than in the private sector but lifelong job security.
A list of unclaimed positions by an education consultancy revealed how recent scandals have made some career opportunities just too risky to be worthwhile.
Of the 19,538 job openings listed, 204 had not drawn any applicants by Wednesday afternoon, according to Zhonggong Yijiao, a job-training chain consultancy which prepares applicants for workplace exams.
This comes after about seven million university graduates joined China’s job market this summer. In August, one in two new graduates was still looking for a job, state media said, calling this year the worst in decades to be a jobseeker.
Many of the jobs that drew no candidates were related to financial oversight or the environment, figures showed.