A government job is still considered a plum post for university
graduates and other Chinese job-seekers as the latest figures show
60 applicants would compete for each government job on average
during an upcoming nationwide government recruitment.
Online applications for the 2008 national civil servant
recruitment exam ended over the weekend, with the most popular
position, a post with the Ministry of Agriculture, attracting more
than 3,500 applicants, the Ministry of Personnel website revealed
on Tuesday.
"More than 800,000 applicants passed the first evaluation and
are going to attend a nationwide examination on Dec. 9," said a
statement on the ministry website, which had no information on the
number of overall online registrations for the exam.
Government jobs are closed to those with criminal records,
sacked ex-civil servants, and those caught cheating in civil
servants exams from 2005 to 2007, according to the ministry.
The competition is much more heated than last year when more
than 530,000 applicants contested 12,700 jobs, 42 people competing
for each job on average.
The fiercest competition this time is for posts with the
Communist Party of China's central organs, where 162 people will
compete for each post.
Weather bureau posts are the least popular. A total of 49 posts
with local weather bureaus are open in regions such as Anhui,
Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, Guizhou, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and
Yunnan, with no applicants.
In a cut-throat employment market, the civil service has become
one of the most popular professions of the country because it
offers a stable income, social status and excellent welfare
insurance.
The written test includes two sessions, the administrative
aptitude test(AAT) in the morning and the essay test in the
afternoon, before a more competitive interview at the beginning of
2008.
China has been organizing civil servant recruitment examinations
every year since 1994.
(Xinhua News Agency November 7, 2007)