Graduates looking for job openings at a recent job fair in Shanghai.

Layoffs and a shrinking job market have forced fresh graduates to lower their expectations of finding good jobs, some visitors to a national job fair said yesterday.

The job fair, organized by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, began in Tianjin on Sunday and will travel to several major cities for two weeks. The fair offers information on more than 520,000 vacancies for graduates.

Luo Fengming has already realized the difficulty of finding proper employment, although he will major in computer science and technology from the Beijing Institute of Technology next year. So he began looking for a job in September, 10 months before his graduation.

"The deteriorating economic situation has forced me to lower my expected monthly salary from 4,000 yuan ($588) to 2,000 yuan," he said.

Luo has submitted his resume to more than 50 companies and taken a dozen written exams in the past two months. Despite that he has not met with success.

The global financial crisis has made it difficult for graduates to find good jobs, Xinhua quoted Vice-Minister of Human Resources and Social Security Zhang Xiaojian as having said. But "it's important for social stability that graduates' are helped to get jobs," Zhang said.

Though some job seekers are more confident of success than Luo, they have lowered their expectations, too.

As Dong Fangzhao, a postgraduate in English from Beijing Jiaotong University, said: "I know I'll find a job in the end because my master's degree is relatively advantageous. But I wouldn't demand a high salary because of the economic situation."