Quote: (04-04-2015 01:36 AM)Fast Eddie Wrote:
Quote: (03-13-2015 10:33 PM)Suits Wrote:
Quote: (03-13-2015 10:25 PM)clever alias Wrote:
Quote: (03-13-2015 04:09 PM)Fast Eddie Wrote:
Quote: (03-13-2015 09:46 AM)clever alias Wrote:
Even if you go to Peking University, nobody will give a shit. OPs state school will get him farther. The only thing worth studying for is a master's in Chinese language.
Source: I went to a C-9 university for a year. The international programs are Visa farm cash cows. Everybody knows this.
I can't actually recall a single success story of someone here networking his way into a job in China, despite it being a regularly thrown around piece of advice.
So are you saying that there is absolutely no way for people to get a "professional" job in China, unless they are lucky enough to convince the Western company they already work for to send them there?
I've said this dozens of times already. Do you have a technical, in demand skill? Do you have a lot of management experience? No? Then it's a long journey, and it's uphill the entire way.
Is there anywhere in the world where you can get a "professional" job without "professional" skills?
As a rule, you can with the skills/education, but that would be for an entry level salary, which will pay for far below a Western standard of living in China.
If you want to make enough money to live well (as in not share a bed with a roommate, which is what many of my younger [20-25] friends do to survive here), you'll need enough demonstrated skills, education and experience to convince employers they'll make money spending the extra money to hire you.
So, the short answer to your question, is no.
Of course, you'll need demonstrated skills, education and experiences to get hired by Western company at a level where you have enough value to be worth sending overseas.
Until then, you get an entry level position and try to increase your value in the West until you are valuable enough to be placed in a key position in Asia that can't be filled by 10 high quality locals for the same cost.
I still think this view is overly pessimistic. For example, there are a shitload of young Europeans fresh out of university who somehow are finding gigs in Shanghai without having any Chinese language skills or previous professional experience. I met many of those peeps during my year there. How they are accomplishing this, I sadly don't know.
Or take high finance for that matter. It's actually easier for an American student at HYPS to get posted to the HK or Tokyo office of a major investment bank than the NYC office, even though the vast majority of those kids speak no Asian languages and have had zero exposure to Asia prior to their assignment.
Of course, nobody in this thread has a chance in hell of getting into investment banking but the point is this: it's not always about tangible, hard skillsets that you bring to the table and the company doing a cost-benefit analysis before assigning you to a role/location. You really think Goldman Sachs recruits from Harvard and Standford and pays its 22 year old analysts with History majors 80k base +80K bonus because that's the only way those excel spreadsheets are going to get filled out? Hell no. They're investing in people because they only want the cream of the crop to work for their firm. If you can convince someone that YOU are worth investing in then you too can get hired in Asia for a decent salary and given a meaningful role, even if on the surface you have no skills or experience that would seem to justify it.
Ironically, it's often the limited, highly specific functions like "accountant" or "quality improvement engineer" that require the hard sell of having X years of experience doing YZ things. With those kinds of roles you're right, you're not going to get the job unless you've got the exact combination of skills and experience the job requires. But a lot of roles that have more potential for advancement to elite status, like management consulting, for example, don't require any specific skillset. They just want high quality individuals who are comfortable being put in the hot seat and can produce solutions and effectively deal with the client. Those kind of roles are more of a "who you are" rather than "what have you done so far" kinda thing, and they're usually the most lucrative in the long run.
Agreed the thread is far too pessimistic. I found a good internship and a well paid professional job in China (Shenzhen and Beijing) with very little experience. I found a local company in my home town with a huge operation in China and searched for intern jobs on their site every week. I wrote glowing cover letters about why I wanted to work for them and I worked hard for my interview. When I was over there I found another job very easily through networking with the people I had made friends with. Not BS business card swapping (which I did a lot of and was no help), people I actually spent a lot of time with helped me. Choose your friends wisely when you are over there. I often dip my feet into the job market in China and there is always professional jobs going with western companies that don't require 10-20 years experience. It's mostly mid sized companies who have China operations and need somebody on the ground who they can trust.