Mismatch showed in job supply, demand

Yu Hongxing, an administrative chief from Baigao Education, a training institution in architectural industry, said most job seekers came to the fair with a wait-and-see attitude even though the company offered an annual salary of 1 million yuan ($164,800) for senior sales managers.

Spring Festival gives way to job fairs

Postgraduates get hard lessons at job fair

"Most of our job vacancies are related to investment and sales, but we found out that many job hunters are not interested in such challenging jobs, but prefer office work like administration, which we don't need," he said.

Some job seekers also noticed the mismatch in what they want to do and the positions that were available.

Zhao Liyuan, a senior from Xingtai, Hebei province, who is majoring in communication technology, came to the job fair at about 8:30 am on Sunday before the fair opened.

However, after carefully reading the brochure that listed all the job vacancies at the fair, the 22-year-old Zhao realized that there weren't any jobs that would enable him to become a communication technician, the position for which he has trained for three years.

Companies attending the two-day fair planned to hire 20,000 workers for 8,000 positions, according to the fair organizer, Chaoyang district's human resources service center.

Wang Guangzhou, a researcher at the Institute of Population and Labor Economics under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the discrepancy between jobs wanted and offered shows that China's labor market will have a labor shortage and structural imbalance in the long run.

"China's working-age population reached a turning point in 2012 and began an accelerated decline," he said.

"However, our education system has failed to adjust accordingly with the demographic change. Our students trained in colleges cannot meet the demand of the market, and it is hard for them to find jobs they like."

He said it will take time for China to upgrade its economy and reform the educational system to relieve the labor shortage.