Administrators topped the charts for most hotly contested job, while landscape engineers had the easiest time of finding positions, according to a 2004 job market survey by leading recruitment website www.zhaopin.com.

With an average 237 applicants going for each post, secretaries and office managers surpassed accountants and sales managers as the most competitive vocations.

Almost all employers advertising at www.zhaopin.com required administrative candidates to have some journalism, economics or finance credentials, in addition to a good command of English.

Landscape engineers were much luckier, thanks to a booming real estate industry providing abundant opportunities for this relatively scarce profession. Each landscaping opening attracted just 36 applicants on average, the least competitive of all the professional jobs surveyed.

Generally speaking, the job market remained tense with demand and supply both growing.

For example, the number of ads on the website seeking electronic and mechanical engineers reached 111,780 in 2004, up 57 percent on the previous year. But each applicant still had to compete with 70 or so others. This was repeated in other keys sectors of employment, such as IT and telecommunications.

Intensive competition made employees more cautious about changing jobs. Only 10 percent of respondents to an online questionnaire on the same website said they would consider a switch this year, compared to 16 percent a year ago.

The proportion of those who wanted higher salaries in the same position rose from 9 percent a year ago to 15 percent, a sign that more are forgoing random job changes in favor of solid career development.

Nevertheless, senior professionals still had a clear upper hand in the fierce competition despite a cloudy employment climate.

Ordinary graduates in accounting or finance had a hard time with an average 189 applicants vying for a single post. But high-caliber financial professionals with an international perspective are the real cream of the market. Some 62 foreign banks had opened 204 offices in the country by the end of October, and more cities in the country's west and northeast will open RMB businesses to foreign banks as scheduled in China's World Trade Organization accession protocol. There will be many alluring job opportunities for senior financial professionals as that trend continues.

Higher education credentials were also helpful. The Ministry of Personnel said that in the third quarter of 2004, the number of jobs for college graduates and postgraduates increased by 3.9 and 1.2 percent respectively, whereas that for people without junior college credentials declined 5.1 percent.

About 2.8 million students graduated from college in 2004 nationwide.

(China Daily January 4, 2005)