Enhanced Vocational Training Needed to Increase Human Resources

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, July 29, 2002

Enhanced Vocational Training Needed to Increase Human Resources

With China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), vocational education will play a vital role in increasing the rate of employment and tapping human resources.

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With China's entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO), vocational education will play a vital role in increasing the rate of employment and tapping human resources.

Economists and educational experts said Sunday at a forum on vocational education held during a four-day national vocational education exhibition in Changchun, capital of Jilin Province, northeast China.

Zhang Xiaoji, head of the Foreign Economic Relations Departmentof the Development and Research Center under the State Council, said China is facing increasing challenges in developing its humanresources.

Cheap labor is one of China's advantages when it is competing with foreign countries, but it will play a less significant role in the future, Zhang said.

China has the world's largest population and labor force, but it does not have the richest human resources, he added.

According to the World Bank, human resources are one of the keyindicators of a country's national wealth.

World Bank statistics show that in 1999 China's population was about 4.58 times that of the United States, but its human resources only accounted for 44.3 percent of the United States. There is a big gap between the average productivity of the two countries.

Over the past two decades, about 60 percent of the foreign investment to China focused on the manufacturing sector. Currentlythere is increasing investment in high-tech sectors such as telecommunication and electronic industries.

"The boom in China's high-tech industries plus the country's fast economic growth demand a large number of well-trained workers,which poses challenges as well as opportunities to China's vocational education," said Zhang.

In response to the challenges in the field of human resources, Chen Zhili, minister of education, said China plans to reform its middle and higher vocational educational systems with focus placedon training professional workers to meet the demands of the market.

Experts suggest that besides improving the school training system, China should also upgrade its pre-employment, on-the-job and retraining programs to increase the mobility of China's work force.

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