Category News of China

China to recruit 19,000 national-level civil servants

China’s national-level government agencies, their affiliated public institutions and local branches will recruit over 19,000 civil servants in 2014, a slight decrease from 2013.

The 2014 public service exam for national-level governments will open to applications on Wednesday, the Organization Department of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MOHRSS) announced on Monday.

In 2013’s exam, 20,839 positions were open to application.

According to authorities, the 2014 public service selection will continue favoring candidates who have worked in grassroots communities.

Most positions in government agencies above provincial level will require two years of grassroots working experience. About 10 percent of all vacancies will be set aside for college graduates-turned-village-heads.

A civil servant role remains the most sought-after jobs in China, despite the country’s efforts to cool public service “fever,” such as encouraging young people to start their own businesses or to work in grass-root communities.

Statistics show that qualified applicants in the 2011, 2012 and 2013 annual national-level public service exams totaled 1.3 million, 1.23 million and 1.38 million respectively. They stood a slim chance of securing a job in the public service.

Officials and scholars attributed popularity of the public service exam to people favoring a stable job, worship of officialdom and benefits civil servants enjoy.

Yin Weimin, MOHRSS minister, said employment pressure contributed to the exam’s popularity, besides the public service exam provides an open and fair channel for job hunters.

Also, civil servants usually enjoy a stable job, social respect and handsome welfare, Yin said.

Ma Qingyu, professor with the Chinese Academy of Governance, said as many jobs become more competitive and less stable, a civil service job stands out for its stability and welfare benefits.

Chi Fulin, executive president of the China Institute for Reform and Development, believed Chinese people’s traditional worship for officialdom also plays a role behind the high popularity of civil service jobs.

The growth of the market economy has created considerable job opportunities, broadening the space for personal development, Chi said. However, if people still covet power and the benefits it brings along, it signals regression of society.

Ma said even today, many people regard climbing up the official ladder as the one sure path to success.

Zhang Yuan, a civil servant who was recruited by the Ministry of Finance two years ago, said, “To my farmer parents, being a civil servant is a glorious job. The day when I received recruitment notice, my father who never drinks gave me a toast.”

Additionally, scholars argued that extra benefits attached to a civil service job also makes it appealing, such as government-covered health care, subsidized housing, high pension rates, among other benefits.

Chu Jianguo, public management professor with Wuhan University, said only when the current health care and pension reforms for civil servants prevail and they enjoy the same welfare benefits as other social groups, will people’s career choices diversify.

Chi Fulin suggested stricter evaluation and exit mechanisms be established for civil servants so as to destroy the “iron rice bowl”, byword for stable jobs.

Work Or You Can’t Graduate: Chinese College Students Forced To Labor Illegally In Foxconn Factory To Make PlayStation 4 Console

Foxconn, the electronics contract manufacturing firm that supplies products to Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) and many other companies, is facing yet another controversy over its labor practices.

The Taiwan-based company has recently admitted to violating its own rules by employing student interns for overtime and night shifts at their factories.

Students from a university in Yantai, located in the northern coastal province of Shandong, have come forward to Chinese media claiming that more than a thousand of their classmates have been working illegal overtime hours at a nearby Foxconn factory helping in the production and packaging of the soon-to-be debuted Sony (NYSE: SNE) PlayStation 4 gaming console. Sony has confirmed that Foxconn is manufacturing the PlayStation 4, but did not confirm if they were made at the Yantai location.

“There have been a few instances where our polices pertaining to overtime and night shift work were not enforced,” Foxconn said in a statement. “Immediate actions have not been taken to bring that campus into full compliance with our code and policies.”

The students were essentially forced to work at the factory in order to fulfill their credit requirements to graduate. According to a report by Hong Kong’s Oriental Daily newspaper, the class of engineering students at the Xi’an Institute of Technology was told that participation in the internship at Foxconn was “necessary” if they wanted to receive six credits that would make them eligible to graduate on time. Foxconn said that the company has internship programs set up in various locations in China, but insisted that the experience is intended to give students an “opportunity to gain practical work experience and on-the-job training that will support their efforts to find employment following their graduation.” According to Quartz, the “internships” included performing such tasks as gluing parts together, applying stickers and boxing up accessories, earning students the same wage as entry-level employees.

Foxconn has a long and troubling history of labor woes. Just last year, the same factory that the university students have come forward about admitted to temporarily hiring under-age interns, some of whom were as young as 14 years old.

In 2010 Foxconn was under investigation after a string of factory-worker suicides (largely due to overwork and poor working conditions) drew attention from labor rights activists and the global media.

The latest allegations came just days after Foxconn CEO Terry Gou made a statement about the lack of young people interested in factory jobs. Talking to a delegation at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Forum in Bali, Indonesia, Gou lamented on how China’s young workers were no longer lining up to work on an assembly line and instead were more interested in finding jobs in the technology or service sectors.

Doubts over accuracy of data on pay rises

Newly released official data about pay rises in the 2007-2011 period has stirred online debate over the figures’ accuracy, with many believing the increases are not remarkable enough considering inflation and surging housing prices.

The Chinese Academy of Personnel Science on Thursday published a report on the development of human resources in China, showing that the average annual salary of urban employees increased from 24,721 yuan (US$4,022) in 2007 to 41,799 yuan in 2011, up 69.1 percent.

In 2012, the average yearly salary for urban employees in non-private sectors stood at 46,769 yuan, up 9 percent year on year after deducting price factors, according to the report.

The news triggered heated discussion soon after appearing on popular Chinese websites — most netizens questioned the figures in the context of their own lower salaries and deemed the data useless amid surging expenditure.

“I feel ashamed that my salary is again below the average level” was a common comment on Sina Weibo, one of China’s most popular Twitter-like services.

Microblogger “joys” said: “After carefully rechecking my paychecks, I am sure that I was ‘averaged’ with other rich workers.”

In fact, many indicated the high salaries only belong to civil servants and employees at state-owned enterprises and monopolies.

Meanwhile, the debate turned against the relatively larger growth in prices, especially in the real estate businesses.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, China’s consumer price index, the main gauge of inflation, increased 2.6 percent year on year in August, a slight decline from 2.7 percent in July.

The CPI rose 2.6 percent year on year by the end of 2012, but it was a rise of 5.4 percent in 2011 from the previous year, well above the government’s full-year inflation control target of 4 percent.

On the other hand, driven by rapid urbanization and speculation, China’s property market has taken off in recent years, especially after the economic stimulus policies the government unveiled in 2009 to help the country weather the global financial crisis.

The China Index Academy, a leading property research institution, said the average new home price among 100 cities stood at 10,554 yuan per square meter in September, up 1.07 percent from August and an increase for a 16th consecutive month.

Foxconn admits student interns worked night shifts, overtime in breach of own rules

Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn, which assembles products for companies such as Apple, Sony and Nokia, admitted Friday that student interns had worked night shifts and overtime at one of its plants in China in breach of its owns labor rules.

The embarrassing admission came after Chinese media reported last year that students from a university in the central city of Xian were allegedly forced to join Foxconn’s internship program at its Yantai plant in the eastern province of Shandong.

Instead of doing work related to their major, the information engineering students claimed they were assigned to assembly lines to make Sony’s PlayStation game consoles and were forced to toil for up to 11 hours a day.

More from GlobalPost: Foxconn to open American factories?

They were allegedly told they wouldn’t graduate if they quit.

“Regarding the internship program at our Yantai campus, we have determined that there have been a few instances where our policy pertaining to overtime and night shift work were not enforced,” the company said Friday.

“Our priority is to protect the rights of all workers and interns, and we will continue to monitor the program closely to ensure that such infractions are not repeated.”

Foxconn, which has been under the spotlight after a series of suicides and labor unrest at its Chinese plants in recent years, previously admitted employing underage interns at the Yantai factory.

Merck’s Job Cuts Highlight A Big Problem Facing Big Pharma Companies

Merck (NYSE:MRK) has announced that it will cut its workforce by 20% over the next two years, which could result in the loss of close to 16,000 jobs. This will leave the company with less than 65,000 employees which is in stark contrast to its peak strength of close to 100,000 employees following its acquisition of Schering-Plough in 2009. [1] With this restructuring, Merck intends to save $2.5 billion annually which can boost its free cash flows by almost 20%. However, the impact will be mitigated by the expected restructuring costs of roughly $2.5 billion to $3 billion. [1]

The company’s move highlights the broader problems that Merck and other big pharmaceutical firms are facing today. The R&D (research and development) productivity has declined over the years, and the strategy of developing drugs for major diseases is not working. The landscape of the global pharmaceutical industry is shifting towards more niche, innovative and genetically targeted medicines. In addition, Merck is suffering from the loss of patent exclusivity for some of its major drugs and may look for acquisition of some promising medicines to offset the failure of some of its research projects.

What Is The Problem That Merck Is Facing?

Like other major pharmaceutical companies, Merck is also battling the impact of patent expiry of its several major drugs including Singulair, Propecia, Clarinex, Maxalt, Cozaar and Hyzaar. Out of these, asthma drug Singulair has had the biggest impact and has continually weighed on Merck’s growth for the past few quarters. Worldwide sales of Singulair, a once-a-day oral medicine for chronic treatment of asthma and relief of symptoms of allergic rhinitis, stood at $5.5 billion for 2011. However, this figure declined to $3.85 billion in 2012 following its patent expiry in August same year. Merck expects that within two years following the patent expiration it will lose substantially all U.S. sales of Singulair, with most of those declines coming in the first year.

In addition, Merck’s cardiovascular division has also been hurt by the patent cliff as its drugs Cozaar/Hyzaar, which garnered over $2 billion in revenue in 2010, lost patent exclusivity in large markets including the U.S. and Europe in late 2010. As a result, sales fell by roughly 35% to $1.3 billion in 2012. Additionally, Propecia, Clarinex and Maxalt together accounted for roughly $1.5 billion in revenues in 2012. Due to patent expiries, we expect their combined sales to go down to about $1-1.1 billion in 2013.

While the big drugs are losing their sales, there is little chance for new blockbusters replacing them. The R&D productivity has significantly declined over the last decade. Although the industry’s R&D spend has increased, the number of new drugs approved by the FDA has come down. In fact, Merck is planning to terminate certain drugs in late stage development and intends to focus on acquiring experimental drugs.

What Is Merck Likely To Focus On?

There has to be a shift from developing blockbusters treating major diseases to focusing on niche therapeutic areas where although the patient population is low, pricing is quite high due to high specificity and efficacy. Major therapeutic areas are getting flooded with generics and there haven’t been any major advancements to thwart the competition. Merck has mentioned that it plans to continue investing in vaccines and diabetes, where it already has successful products.

Diabetes

Merck’s type 2 diabetes treatment drugs Januvia and Janumet saw strong volume growth in international markets and retained their market leadership with 70% share in the second quarter. [2] Excluding the impact of currency movement, Januvia saw its sales jump by 7% while Janumet’s revenues surged 17%. [3] In addition, the company is working with Pfizer to develop and commercialize its investigational SGLT2 inhibitor, Ertugliflozin, for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. With obesity on the rise, diabetes is affecting more people globally. In the U.S. alone, roughly 26 million people suffer from the condition. [4] China’s problem is even worse, as a report suggests that 11.6% of Chinese adults have diabetes and around 40% of adults between the age of 18 and 29 are on the verge of developing it. [5] That puts China’s diabetes patient count at 114 million individuals, and this figure is likely to go higher. According to IMS health, China’s diabetes market is expected to grow 20% annually and reach $3.2 billion by 2016. [6]

We currently account Januvia’s revenues under Alimentary & Metabolism drugs division, which constitutes roughly 15% to our price estimate for Merck. Januvia’s importance can be gauged from the fact that the exclusion of the drug’s sales from Merck’s revenue forecast leads to downside of about 5-10% to our price estimate. That’s a lot of value for a single drug in a diversified company like Merck.

Acquisition Strategy

It appears that Merck will trim down its R&D expenses, and instead focus on acquiring drugs externally. This way, the company will assume the role of pharmaceutical private equity/venture capitalist firm to a certain degree. In addition, we believe that it can pursue orphan drugs, and novel therapies including higher focus on gene therapy, stem cell research etc.

Cancer Treatment

Cancer treatment is a growing market for the pharmaceutical industry. The opportunity comes from the fact that global incidence of Cancer is likely to increase from about 12.7 million in 2008 to 21.3 million in 2030. [7] In addition, the number of deaths are likely to show a similar growth trajectory as depicted in the chart below. Cancer is a not a single disease, it has in fact more than 200 types and thousands of subtypes affecting more than 60 organs. That gives an opportunity for Merck to develop novel therapies and capture niche markets.

Our price estimate for Merck stands at $51.60, implying a premium of about 5-10% to the market price.

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Notes:
Merck to Cut Staff by 20% as Big Pharma Trims R&D, The Wall Street Journal, Oct 22013 [?] [?]
Merck’s Q2 2013 Earnings Transcript [?]
ref:1 [?]
National Diabetes Fact Sheet, 2011, CDC [?]
China ‘Catastrophe’ Hits 114 Million as Diabetes Spreads, Bloomberg, Sept 4 2013 [?]
China Diabetes Triples Creating $3.2 Billion Drug Market, Bloomberg, Nov 5 2012 [?]
J&J’s Investor Presentation [?]

Foxconn admits student intern labour violations at China plant

Electronics manufacturer Foxconn, which became notorious after a string of workers’ suicides in 2010, has admitted that student interns worked overtime and night shifts at a factory in northeast China in violation of company policy.

Students told Chinese media that more than a thousand of their classmates worked on basic tasks such as putting together and packaging parts for Sony’s forthcoming PlayStation 4 consoles. The college programme at the factory in Yantai, Shandong province, was a graduation requirement, they said.

The admission is a blow to the Taiwanese company most famous for assembling Apple products, and comes in the same week as Terry Gou, its founder and chairman lamented that young Chinese are shunning monotonous, low-paid assembly line jobs.

The same factory last year admitted to having temporarily hired underage interns.

“There have been a few instances where our policies pertaining to overtime and night shift work were not enforced. Immediate actions have been taken to bring that campus into full compliance with our code and policies,” said Foxconn in a statement.

Foxconn have not confirmed or denied that they make the PlayStation 4 at Yantai. Last year, it said the factory did not produce Apple products. Sony confirmed that Foxconn is assembling the PlayStation 4, but did not specify at which factory.

The Taiwanese company, listed in Taipei under the name Hon Hai Precision Industries, last year found that students as young as 14 had been working at the Yantai campus for a few weeks. It pledged at the time to investigate how workers younger than the minimum age of 16 came to be working at the plant.

Foxconn and other contract manufacturers regularly employ students as temporary workers to give the students a chance to gain skills. The programmes are sometimes criticised by labour activists, who say the students often make up for staff shortages and are not offered meaningful training.

Under Foxconn’s policies, interns are not allowed to work overtime or nights and have the right to leave the programme at any time.

As part of its work with the Fair Labor Association – independent inspectors brought in by Apple to audit some Foxconn factories, not including the Yantai facilities – Foxconn has also pledged to ensure that interns’ work matched their educational programmes, according to FLA’s report on its work.

Analysts and news reports in Taiwan and mainland China indicate that other electronics manufacturing companies have been facing staffing shortages as production on new popular products such as the iPhone 5c and 5s ramp up and distributors stock up ahead of the winter holiday season.

Pegatron, which manufactures for groups including Apple and Sony, has been facing “severe” staffing shortages near its Shanghai factories, said analysts at Nomura in a recent note.

Shanghai FTZ starts offering registration services

A total of 577 people applied for enterprise registration at the newly-launched Shanghai pilot free trade zone (FTZ) on Tuesday, the first day for registration, according to an official statement.

Meanwhile, 1,480 people visited the zone’s service lobby asking for advice and information on Tuesday, according to the statement.

Sun Baohua, a businessman from Wenzhou City of neighboring Zhejiang Province, was the first person to apply for a registration.

Sun, who owns micro-financing company, has rented a 20-square-meter warehouse in the zone as his office. He is expected to get his business license within four days.

“The financial institutions allowed to run businesses in the zone are all big companies,” said Sun. “While my company caters for medium and small-sized enterprises with lower interest rates.”

The Chinese government officially inaugurated the 29-square-km Shanghai FTZ on Sept. 29.

Testing of a convertible yuan, wider opening of 18 service sectors, a negative list approach in governing foreign investment, among other initial steps, are expected to unleash economic potential in the zone in the coming two to three years.

Beijing to hold next year’s APEC summit

The 2014 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit will be held in Beijing. It is viewed as a good opportunity to expedite urban development and pollution control, said a press officer of the Beijing municipal government.

Zhao Huimin, director general of the Foreign Affairs Office of Beijing’s municipal government, announced that the 2014 APEC summit will be held at Yanqi Lake, a scenic site in Beijing’s northwestern suburbs at a Tuesday press briefing in Bali, Indonesia.

Yanqi Lake was selected to let leaders of the APEC member economies enjoy the beautiful views of Beijing’s outskirts, Zhao said, adding that compared with the time when Beijing held the 29th Olympic Games in 2008, the city has become more experienced to curb air pollution.

“Construction work at the site will follow environmentally-friendly principles. The venues will be using 100 percent clean energy, with all sewage and household waste processed, making the site an outstanding example of green and energy saving architecture,” Zhao was quoted by the Beijing Youth Daily as saying.

The public expressed their welcome to the summit. However, severe air pollution which haunted the capital during the seven-day National Day holiday and reoccurred recently became the biggest challenge the city is facing.

“Compared with 2008, Beijing is facing greater pressure due to an increasing number of vehicles and more chemical facilities have been seen around Beijing in the past five years,” Wang Tao, a scholar at Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, told the Global Times.

“Air pollution is hard to curb within one year unless the government shuts down those chemical plants and takes more tightened restrictions to vehicle usage,” Wang noted.

Beijing had launched an ambitious and strict clean air plan, aiming to reduce polluting particulate matter by 25 percent from 2012 by 2017.

The project was designed to be an international conference and exhibition center which takes up 31 square kilometers, with a total investment of 36 billion yuan ($5.9 billion) and is capable of housing up to 20,000 people.

“The construction of the site started several months ago. Many engineering companies have participated in the project, with some of the buildings being close to finished now,” a communication officer, surnamed Guo, with a construction company responsible for three buildings of the project, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

Zhao also presented the logo of the 2014 APEC summit, which represents the Chinese government’s wish of cooperation with the other member economies by outlining a pattern of the earth with 21 horizontal, colorful lines, each representing a member economy.

The design also shares a similarity with Tiantan, or the Temple of Heaven, one of the most popular historical sites in Beijing.

‘Skills list’ to attract overseas talent

China is to publish a list of work skills most in demand to aid recruitment from overseas, a top official in charge of foreign affairs has revealed.

Speaking ahead of the 2013 Friendship Award ceremony on Saturday, Liu Yanguo, deputy director of the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, said his authority is identifying shortages in the domestic labor market.

“We’ll do research with human resource departments and employers to learn what types of workers they feel are hard to find,” he told China Daily.

The list is scheduled for release next year, and will be updated to keep pace with changes in market demand.

How and where it will be published, as well as other details, are still under discussion, Liu added.

Wang Huiyao, director-general of the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing think tank, welcomed the move.

“It’s important to have such a list. It can improve the effect of recruitment from abroad,” he said.

By listening to employers’ demands, he said, authorities will be able to pinpoint industries with long-term skill shortages and introduce favorable policies.

Shanghai began publishing a recruitment list for overseas talent in 2011. On the list, nine State-owned enterprises, including Shanghai Electric, provide 72 job vacancies that they plan to fill, with salaries up to 800,000 yuan ($131,000).

China needs foreign talent from all walks of life, especially people with expertise in management, technology and science, Liu said.

He added that China’s efforts to recognize and reward people who have made tremendous contributions to China’s development and bilateral friendship is equally important in attracting high-end talent.

Fifty foreign experts received the Friendship Award this year. The prize is the highest accolade given to foreign citizens by the Chinese government.

Liu said all winners are distinctive foreign experts working in China.

Many recipients this year are leading scientists and scholars, including Israeli biologist Aharon Ciechanover, the 2004 Nobel laureate in chemistry, who is director of Nanjing University’s Institute of Chemistry and Biomedical Sciences.

“Thirty years ago, most foreign experts came to help China solve technological problems, but now China also enables foreign experts to realize their dream and boost their career development,” Liu said.

Noticeably, four recipients, including Ravi Shankar Narasimhan, a senior editor at China Daily, were recognized for efforts in “helping China better tell its stories to the outside world”, Liu said.

“Many foreigners, after they came to China, realized China was not a rising monster but a fascinating country,” Liu said. “We appreciate foreign experts’ efforts can help the outside world better understand China.”

Internships have become a necessity for graduates to secure jobs

The job market has become so competitive that even well-qualified graduates need to secure internships to find work

Twenty-three-year-old Baptist University graduate Trista Hon has reason to be excited. She is about to start working at BDO, an international accounting company, after beating many others for the position.

Hon attributes her success to her two-month working experience in Shanghai in the summer of last year. Hon took part in the government’s Mainland Experience Scheme, a five-year pilot scheme launched in 2011 to sponsor short-term internships, or learning programmes, in the mainland for about 30,000 students.

“Auditing jobs require frequent travel to the mainland. It helps a lot that I have some understanding of working across the border. I can also adjust to working in the mainland better than other students,” says Hon, who will be based in Hong Kong for the near future.

To prepare Hon for her stay in the mainland last year, Baptist University’s career centre evaluated her fluency in Putonghua, along with her ability to cope with emergencies when working outside the territory.

In the current competitive economic environment, internships can give potential graduates a head start. Every day, recruiters are flooded with applications from university students who possess stunning academic credentials.

“We come across graduates with impressive academic and extra-curricular credentials all the time,” says Sue Kim, founder of LIBBLE, an online platform established two years ago that is dedicated to the development of new graduates, and job matching.

“It’s very easy to find a graduate who speaks four languages, has completed more than three internships or won academic scholarships, on our talent database,” says Kim. “Competition has indeed become fierce.”

In response to this challenging employment landscape, career centres at universities are constantly on the lookout for internship opportunities locally, globally and in the mainland.

Since 2005, Polytechnic University has required students to complete at least one internship before graduation. Every year, an average of 3,000 students from PolyU are engaged in an internship.

This summer, Chinese University placed 570 students in internships in 24 countries, under its global internship programme.

“Employers prefer job applicants with internship experience because they are more mature and more familiar with the corporate world,” says Melina Lai, director of the Office of Careers and Placement Services at PolyU. “They tend to have a stronger work ethic and are more adaptable.”

“If a new graduate has never done an internship, employers may wonder if the graduate lacks the initiative to look for one,” she explains.

The chance of a student being hired is boosted if he or she has international working experience, according to Dr Tim Wong, head of Baptist University’s career centre. “Medium to large-sized companies are selective in the recruitment process, and an international internship would improve the chance for a job candidate,” he says.

Echoing Wong, Lai says students with international experience had demonstrated better communications skills and flexibility, and were more independent.

Work experience prior to leaving school is especially beneficial for students without a professional degree. For example, an English major with an emphasis on languages and literature has plenty of options other than teaching, including administration, journalism, legal services, sales and marketing, and public relations.

“Employers are looking for people who have been exposed to more than one particular field,” Wong says.

Career advisers at the institutes are charged with the task of equipping students with the skills for a smooth transition into corporate life. Training courses and workshops on job hunting skills, interview etiquette, and resume writing, are organised on campus.

Before they start their internship, students are briefed on issues such as foreign culture, if they are heading to the mainland or overseas, and the jargon of particular industries.

The role interns are expected to play has changed over the years. In the past, the youngsters were seen as helping hands to provide support for the regular staff in an office. But now the new entrants are increasingly being integrated into overall manpower planning.

An internship can pave the way for a permanent position in large companies. Banks, in particular, may issue conditional offers to student workers who perform well, before they get their degrees.

Many employers view an internship as an arrangement that is meant to benefit the company as well as the student. “[It is] for the mutual benefit of the students and the employers themselves,” says Lai. “We have come across small and medium sized enterprises which offer internships to develop students’ interest in their fields.

“Eventually, the employers hope to secure their long-term commitment to the company. This in turn, helps to plug the shortfall from the turnover of regular staff,” she says.

While a university degree, stellar academic results and other criteria are often advantageous, employers also take soft skills into consideration to identify the right candidates.

Sectors like banking, asset management, consumer products, retail and technology want to be sure that the young workers have a can-do attitude and are reliable, Kim says. “To impress experienced recruiters, graduates need to be able to show genuine passion and interest for the role. They can do this by having a good understanding of themselves and their interests,” she says.

“They are also looking for people who can formulate their own views. Critical thinking and problem-solving skills are useful, as is the ability to construct a sound opinion.” Baptist University encourages students to become involved in community projects. They try to get them to help with the co-ordination, rather than just join in. “Students nowadays tend to be less independent. They need to become proactive in finding resources,” Wong says.

The recent death of an intern at Bank of America in London, which is believed have been caused by excessive work, raised questions about the exploitation of young graduates.

“We always monitor the situation of our students closely by keeping in touch with them throughout the internship,” Wong says.

Staff from the career centre join students abroad to help them settle in, he says, adding that social media is used to share information among students and keep track of their situation.