I love the excitement after a "brilliant" idea hits you. It's why I've always tried to figure out how I can get into the "ideas" business. In this case, it started with the McKinsey article/report I read yesterday on China's lack of skilled labor. The article titled "
China's looming talent shortage", which is also part of a larger report
The Emerging Global Labor Market: Part I--The Demand for Offshore Talent in Services. Both of these are free from the McKinsey website but you do have to register for them.
Excerpt from the article:
The supply paradoxChina's pool of potential talent is enormous. In 2003 China had roughly 8.5 million young professional graduates with up to seven years' work experience and an additional 97 million people that would qualify for support-staff positions.
Despite this apparently vast supply, multinational companies are finding that few graduates have the necessary skills for service occupations. According to interviews with 83 human-resources professionals involved with hiring local graduates in low-wage countries, fewer than 10 percent of Chinese job candidates, on average, would be suitable for work in a foreign company in the nine occupations we studied: engineers, finance workers, accountants, quantitative analysts, generalists, life science researchers, doctors, nurses, and support staff.
Consider engineers. China has 1.6 million young ones, more than any other country we examined.1 Indeed, 33 percent of the university students in China study engineering,2 compared with 20 percent in Germany and just 4 percent in India. But the main drawback of Chinese applicants for engineering jobs, our interviewees said, is the educational system's bias toward theory. Compared with engineering graduates in Europe and North America, who work in teams to achieve practical solutions, Chinese students get little practical experience in projects or teamwork. The result of these differences is that China's pool of young engineers considered suitable for work in multinationals is just 160,000—no larger than the United Kingdom's. Hence the paradox of shortages amid plenty. This caused me to call up my dad who teaches Economics and heads the department in Beijing University to ask about the reality of the university curriculum. The first he said was that the data must be 2 years old, and when I went back through the details of the report, indeed the last data point ended in 2003. The problem with such a large scale study is that it takes time to turn actual data into a full report with analysis that makes sense to the general public. For more than the first time, I realized that the Chinese government is not stupid, they were well aware of this issue and there have been a lot of changes in place to fix it. My dad himself had been to counties out in the farming regions originally known as the poorest counties in the country that are thriving now, with full on foreign language schools with teachers recruited in from outside of china to teach english and business school. How did these extremely poor areas become the hub of foreign trade and business education? The secret lies in what's called land use rights. China being a communist country, is one where there's no personal ownership of property. In the US, when better schools and infrastructure wants to be built, they raise property taxes as a major source of the funding. However, in China, without property owernship, there's no property taxes to raise for this type of funding by the local government and in a poor community the residents cannot shoulder a higher income tax that would required to build new schools. But, what the chinese government has created something called land use rights which can be sold and bought just like property, but you pay for it in one shot and you get something like a 70-year lease with priority renewal rights. For all intents and purposes, it works the same as property ownership. Going back to being communist, the local governments own the land of that county and therefore has at their disposal the sale of the land use rights. When they want to raise funding, they simply sell the land use rights to the mobs of foreign investors rushing in to buy land and property in China, and use the proceeds to build anything they want to. In the farming communities, that becomes foreign language/business schools because the farmers are desperate to get ahead in the world and they know that English and the ability to do business with the rest of the world is KEY.
With that little digression into land use rights, my main point is that since 2003 there have been tremendous changes all over the country to correct the lack of skilled labor issue because the Chinese government is very clear that they want to move towards a service based industry from the manufacturing based one right now. There have been schools and joint programs set up all over the country that specifically teaches conversational english and more practical skills for the degree programs. With the hottest programs being business schools especially Executive MBA types. And it is not only the US that's making the education investment in China, the European Union and major coporations like Microsoft have partnerships with major universities and/or opened their own schools. With all of that, one of the largest individual opportunities in China is to go and teach the very sorely needed higher level business skills. My dad teaches Economics so a lot of MBA students go through his classes. He had them rank what were the most important/useful classes they took, while they ranked Economics dead last, the top ones are: Accounting, Marketing, Communication Skills, Business Modeling/Planning, Negotiation Skills, Business Strategy. What they needed are classes taught by people with real experience and with very practial skills that they can use when they get into the job market. Given the potential # of university graduates every year and all the new schools and programs being built to address this issue, the country has a huge need for teachers. Before you say, "but I can't do that, " let me remind you that all of these classes are taught in English. And, you can simply go and teach a seminar or a short series for a month as opposed to relocating permanently from the get go. This gives anyone the opportunity to check out with new land of opportunity in short periods and at the same time provide an incredibly valuable service to a country with great positive socio-economic impact. That in my book is getting your cake and eating it too. This is particularly and exciting opportunity for me as my husband doesn't speak any Chinese, and as much as he's interested in China, relocation isn't very feasible from a professional point of view. However, he has 10+ years of experience in Finance and can talk your head off about currency fluctuations and investing and I have a nice little MIT degree behind me. If you're as excited as I am about the opportunity to go toottle around China paid for a month at a time, you're probably asking how do I find out these teaching opportunities? Well, I can go through personal connections as my dad's academia and he knows all other guys at other business schools too, but I don't know if there are specific recruiters and head hunters for this stuff as I'm sure there is. I'll share the info as I dig into this more and find out.
