Recruiting in China

Duncan Mavin, Financial Post
Published: Thursday, October 04, 2007

In China's red-hot recruitment market, business professionals are desperate to get ahead of the competition, with qualifications and overseas experience among the most sought after resume credentials.

'Returnees,' Chinese workers who have spent several years honing their business skills abroad, often have their pick of the best jobs, as does any Chinese executive with foreign training.

It's a trend that is leading to a wealth of opportunities for Canadian organizations able to provide the right kind of training.

"It's still a small part of our business, but it's been growing nicely in the past three years," says Roberta Wilton, chief executive officer of CSI, the Canadian Securities Institute.

At Toronto City Hall in August, for instance, twenty-eight Chinese executives became the latest graduates of the Canadian Securities Institute.

The business students from Guangfa Securities, a full-service securities firm based in Gaungzhou, China, graduated from a two-month course organized by CSI in conjunction with the Securities Association of China.

Hundreds of financial professionals from China have participated in CSI's executive style training programs in the past couple of years.

But it isn't the only organization to spot the opportunity.

Ads for the University of Western Ontario's Richard Ivey School of Business are impossible to miss in Hong Kong, where they are plastered all over subways and other prominent places.

The Ivey school has a modern campus in Hong Kong -- with a high-profile location in the heart of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre -- and another office in Beijing, as well as alumni associations in Shanghai and Hong Kong.

Schools from all over the world are catching on fast, says Pete Fiaschi, the head of international marketing at Newcastle College, a vocational school in the northeast of England that focuses on the business of arts, tourism and sports.

Toronto-born Mr. Fiaschi spends most of the summer months travelling through China, including to relatively unknown cities such as Fuzhou or Qingdao, recruiting 200 or so Chinese students whose fees are a significant source of income for the school. In July, he set up permanent regional offices in Beijing and in Dalian, in northern China, to deal with the growing competition for Chinese students.

CSI, too, has a permanent office in Beijing and is about to open a Shanghai office. It also has partnerships with Chinese universities, including the Central University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, and the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics.

There is competition among foreign training providers, says Ms. Wilton. In particular, many of the big foreign banks and securities firms offer training courses, as do the international consulting and accounting firms.

CSI is betting its North American perspective plus its access to trainers from a variety of real live businesses gives it an edge over some more academic institutions as well as companies that can only provide insight from one industry.

Offering courses jointly with the Chinese regulator also helps build credibility, which will lead to deeper inroads in China, says Ms. Wilton.