What will be the changes in talent demand in the new trend of the Year of the Ox? What talent is in short supply, and how will salaries change? Randstad Greater China has released the 2021 Market Outlook and Remuneration Report to reveal one by one.

In Randstad Greater China’s “2021 Market Outlook and Salary Report”, the annual talent market development trend and job demand forecast are discussed and analyzed from five areas: manufacturing, medical services, finance, entertainment consumption and ICT Internet.

Overall talent and employment trends in 2021

Despite the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, due to favorable policy environment and epidemic prevention measures, the resumption of work and production started early, and the development of digital-driven and environmental protection technology has promoted the structural optimization of the manufacturing industry and the optimization of the allocation of manufacturing resources to a certain extent, and the negative impact of the epidemic on China’s manufacturing industry is relatively small.

Data show that China’s manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) in September 2020, released by the China Federation of Logistics and Purchasing and the Service Industry Survey Center of the National Bureau of Statistics, was 52%, up 0.5% from the previous month, and has been running above 50% for seven consecutive months. The average in the third quarter was 51%, up 0.4% from the average in the second quarter, indicating that the economic recovery is gaining momentum. Changes in the sub-indices show that the balance between supply and demand has been further strengthened, foreign trade has continued to improve, large, small and medium-sized enterprises have made concerted progress, the industrial structure has been continuously optimized, and the employment situation has improved.

Judging from the PMI data for the first three quarters of 2020, the manufacturing industry has shown a strong recovery trend after rapidly rebounding from the lowest point during the Spring Festival in February. According to the “2020 Spring Recruitment Job Market Tracking Report”, in terms of machinery/manufacturing, the demand for new graduates in 2020 increased by 57% month-on-month. While demand for jobs in areas such as real estate narrowed, demand for jobs in machinery/manufacturing bucked the trend, outpacing other areas such as electronics/communications and consumer goods.

Manufacturing covers food, beverage and tobacco, textiles and clothing, machinery and transportation equipment, chemicals and other industry sectors. Since 2009, the output value of China’s manufacturing industry has surpassed that of the United States to become the world’s largest manufacturing country, maintaining its position as the world’s largest manufacturing country for ten consecutive years. As a big manufacturing country, manufacturing industry plays an important role in the development of national economy.

Expert opinion

Intelligent manufacturing expert, SASAC Machinery Industry Economic Management Research Institute of The State Council director of the integration of collaborative innovation center, “Smart China” magazine vice president Song Jia said to #AI International Business Review: Manufacturing is the foundation of our country, the foundation of power, intelligent manufacturing is already the industry consensus. As pointed out in this report, there is a profound transformation to automation, digitalization and intelligence in the industry, especially in: digitization of factories, equipment and user value, industrial Internet of Things, restructuring of business models and artificial intelligence. The development of the industry has put forward higher requirements for talents.

The pain point and inflection point in the transformation and upgrading of manufacturing industry

From the perspective of the industrial value chain structure, the domestic manufacturing industry lacks certain experience and technical capabilities in research and development design, core production processes and production line services, and faces three major challenges: rising labor costs, added value difficulties, and diversified market demand.

The demographic dividend effect fades, labor costs rise, and young people are reluctant to work in factories, which limits the talent pool in the manufacturing field. Optimistically, the application of new technologies in the manufacturing industry and the digital and intelligent transformation of factories are expected to help improve efficiency in research and development design, enterprise decision-making, manufacturing, quality management, etc., and help make up for the disadvantage of rising labor costs.

According to Deloitte, the top five deployment priorities for intelligent manufacturing in China’s industrial enterprises are: digital factories (63%), deep mining of equipment and user value (62%), industrial Internet of Things (48%), restructuring of business models (36%) and artificial intelligence (21%).

From the perspective of urban geographical distribution of domestic intelligent manufacturing enterprises, the eastern coastal cities represented by Shandong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong have strong economic strength and rich scientific and technological resources, and the development of intelligent manufacturing is relatively fast, and large manufacturing enterprises have basically realized the transformation from mechanization to automation. It is at the leading level in China in promoting the upgrading of enterprises from digitalization to software, networking and intelligence. The level of intelligent manufacturing and popularization in the central and western regions is slightly lower than that in the eastern coastal areas.