Employers in China face such a severe shortage of logistics staff that one British company is offering work to 20% more candidates than it has jobs.<\/p>\n
Paul Brooks, sales director of Unipart Logistics, said that the company regularly offered employment to between 10% and 20% more candidates than it had jobs because they knew that within a week this number of candidates would take up job offers from other employers. The firm employs 250 staff in China.<\/p>\n
At a press conference during a recent visit to Unipart in Oxford by a Chinese delegation of logistics and education officials to the UK, Brooks said that staff retention was also a major issue, with the industry experiencing an annual staff turnover of more than 50%. Even a small wage increase would entice employees to move to another employer. \u201cThey will leave for 30p more, they will just not turn up,\u201d said Brooks.<\/p>\n
Haoxiang Ren, vice-president of the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing, told Recruiter that in China \u201cthe skills shortage is for every subject and every position in the sector.\u201d <\/p>\n
Ren explained there was a fundamental mismatch between the demands of employers and what the Chinese education system is turning out. \u201cDemand is like a pyramid,\u201d he said, with many more lower level operative-type jobs at the bottom, and relatively few jobs for managers at the top. <\/p>\n
Despite this, he explained that around 400 universities in China provided 100,000 graduates a year studying logistics as a major part of their degree, leading to a glut of people looking to enter the sector at managerial level. <\/p>\n
The problem is made worse, \u201cbecause more and more parents are looking for their children to go to university and not college\u201d, he added. <\/p>\n
In contrast, Ren said that only 90,000 graduates with a relevant qualification left 800 secondary vocational colleges (for 15-18-year-olds) \u2014 an insufficient number to fill the far more numerous lower-level roles. \u201cIt [the education system] doesn\u2019t fit the nature of the industry demand,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Employers in China face such a severe shortage of logistics staff that one British company is offering work to 20% more candidates than it has jobs. Paul Brooks, sales director of Unipart Logistics, said that the company regularly offered employment to between\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3],"class_list":["post-2358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newsofchina","tag-null"],"yoast_head":"\n