RPO and Talent Management Blog by Ochre House | Ochre Talk

China’s war for talent is over! – Or is it?

The latest study by the Center for Work-Life Policy has found that the solution to China’s search for skilled talent is much closer than it appears. It says that the answer to the problem is highly qualified Chinese women.

Just as China is beginning to feel the talent squeeze of its current period of rapid growth, Chinese women are emerging as a very qualified and ambitious talent pool, rivalling not only Chinese men but also their US and European counterparts. The study reveals the extent to which Chinese women are over-taking their peers, but also how they’re impacted by cultural traditions and demographic trends that are quite different from their female counterparts in other nations.

For example, compared to their American and European counterparts, working mothers in China often have many more shoulders to lean on for childcare. In China there is no social stigma in sending your child to day care, boarding school, or to depend on grandparents to provide childcare while their mother pursues a career.

Interestingly, although childcare does not pose a heavy burden on Chinese working mothers, caring for the elderly does. The vast majority of Chinese women have eldercare responsibilities which directly affect how they approach their career paths (i.e., transferring from one city to another to be closer to aging parents, taking a higher paid but less stimulating job to pay for eldercare expenses, even dropping out of the workforce entirely). These sharp differences between Chinese women and their counterparts in other countries show that multinational companies can’t have a ‘one-fits-all’ global policy for women in the workplace, as their drivers and motivators are different.

So if the findings of this study are true, and the challenge of solving China’s war for talent is indeed over if organizations tap into this goldmine of talented professional women. How exactly will these organizations reach the jackpot – How will they attract, motivate and engage this newly discovered talent pool when most of them have never marketed to this workforce group before?

One thing is for certain, if organizations don’t understand it, get it right and ultimately move fast, they will have lost the latest talent pool to their competitor – Again.

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Comments

1. Martin Percival says:

   July 22, 2011 at 6:40 pm

   I visited Beijing and Shanghai on an MBA field study trip in May of this year and I was very impressed by the large numbers of very capable Chinese business women that we met. The irony is that China has the greatest population imbalance of men/women in the world as a legacy of the one child per family policy. Despite this successful Chinese companies seem savy enough to target talented women and many are already in very senior roles.