Young adults aged between 16 and 35 – more than half of the labor force of Shanghai, China’s financial center – are earning an average monthly wage of 7,342 Chinese yuan (US$1,018), according to a report released on Wednesday.
The 2019 Shanghai Youth Employment Status Report was jointly published by the Shanghai Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau and the Shanghai Committee of the Communist Youth League. It studied the employment landscape of Shanghai youth aged 16-35, based on data from the Shanghai employment registration and statistical data generated from surveys.
According to the statistics of the Shanghai Employment Registration Information System, there were a total of 4.938 million young people aged 16-35 who were currently registered in the city, 40% of whom came from the Yangtze River Delta area. There was a decrease of 68,000, or 1.4%, compared with the same period in 2018 (5.006 million).
In terms of the proportion of the total city’s employment, the targeted age group accounted for 48.7% of the registered employment in the city, contributing half of the Shanghai human resource market.
As for the stability of youth employment in Shanghai, the report found it was constantly increasing with the number of young people registered in Shanghai remaining stable at around 5 million in recent years. Fluctuations caused by seasonal changes were kept within 5% or less.
More than 2.919 million, or 59.1% of young people, completed tertiary education or above, which showed an increase of 12.0 million, or 4.3%, compared with the same period in 2018.
It was worth noting that the number of registered and employed youths with a master’s degree or above was 377,000, which was 46,000 individuals more, or a 13,8% increase, compared with the same period in 2018.
Experts believed that the city has continuously enhanced the sense of mission and urgency of “using the talents of the world”, and has effectively introduced a series of policies that help attract more young and well educated workers to come to Shanghai in recent years.