Ning Depeng: Connecting the Entire Education Cycle with a "Broad View of Employment"
The scale of graduates from national ordinary higher education institutions in 2026 is expected to reach 12.7 million, an increase of 480,000 year-on-year, setting another historical high. This year’s Government Work Report proposed the promotion of high-quality full employment and emphasized the "formulation of employment support policies for college graduates and other youth."
Currently, China is at the inception of the implementation of the "15th Five-Year Plan" [1], and the development of new quality productive forces is accumulating a powerful momentum to drive high-quality development. New quality productive forces impose higher standards on the knowledge structure, innovation capacity, and comprehensive literacy of laborers. As a vital hub for the alignment of talent supply and demand, spring recruitment intuitively reflects the practical thirst in the job market for composite talents and top-notch innovative talents. Facing this trend, universities, as the primary front for cultivating high-level talent, must actively adapt to the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation. They must integrate the transmission of professional knowledge with the improvement of comprehensive quality, earnestly enhance the adaptability and support of talent cultivation for the development of new quality productive forces, and consolidate the foundation of high-quality full employment through a comprehensive leap in the quality of talent cultivation.
Consistency Throughout the Process: Opening Up the Entire Employment Chain
Faced with a rapidly changing job market and the strategic requirements of building a meritocracy [2], universities must reverse the traditional mindset of narrowing employment work down to "graduation season promotion" and firmly establish a "Greater View of Employment" that spans the entire cycle of recruitment, cultivation, further study, and career development. The essence of this concept lies in moving the consideration of employment quality forward to the starting point of talent cultivation, making it a core link.
On one hand, we must open up the internal closed loop of "recruitment—cultivation—employment." At the entry point, the formulation of recruitment plans must closely align with national strategic needs and trends in economic and social development to achieve precise matching of supply and demand. In the cultivation phase, emphasis should be placed on guiding students to integrate their personal interests into the frontiers of science and technology and industrial shifts, making professional competence an important benchmark for education and teaching reform. At the evaluation end, it is necessary to shift away from excessive reliance on the "initial employment rate" and instead introduce feedback from employers and third-party evaluations. This involves establishing long-term tracking mechanisms for graduate development, using graduates' job fit, salary growth potential, and social contribution as key indicators for testing the quality of school operations.
On the other hand, a future-oriented lifelong education orientation must be established. Given the reality of accelerating industrial iteration, "whole-process education" covers not only the prescribed years of schooling but also empowerment for long-term development. Universities should focus on cultivating students’ consciousness of lifelong learning, guiding them to transcend the traditional view of "one job selection for life." In curriculum design and teaching evaluation, the weighting of critical thinking and independent learning abilities can be increased, enabling students to truly master the ability to adapt to unknown fields and respond to complex challenges, thereby maintaining core competitiveness throughout their long-term careers.
Breaking Down Barriers: Reshaping New Mechanisms for Cultivation
The characteristic of new quality productive forces is innovation, and the key lies in high quality; this objectively requires universities to break down barriers between traditional disciplines and vigorously cultivate composite innovative talents.
On one hand, universities should further improve the dynamic adjustment and rapid response mechanisms for disciplines and majors. They must closely align with major national strategies and regional leading industries, accelerating the layout of frontier intersectional disciplines such as artificial intelligence, integrated circuits, bio-manufacturing, and new energy, while deeply advancing the construction of "New Engineering, New Medical Science, New Agricultural Science, and New Liberal Arts" [3]. Simultaneously, they should explore the opening of "micro-majors" and interdisciplinary minor degrees to provide students with more institutional flexibility for cross-disciplinary learning, and use digital and intelligent technologies to systematically transform and upgrade traditional majors.
On the other hand, it is necessary to perform "addition" on teaching content and cultivation mechanisms. We must extensively promote digital literacy and artificial intelligence general education, organically integrating the concept of green development, engineering ethics, and innovation and entrepreneurship education into the professional curriculum system to build a progressively advancing core literacy curriculum chain. In this process, the vision of "visiting enterprises to expand jobs" [4] should be expanded from simple supply-demand matching to all-around school-enterprise synergetic education. Relying on carriers such as modern industry colleges and future technology colleges, real corporate projects, R&D topics, and frontline industrial mentors should be introduced into classroom teaching as a matter of course. Meanwhile, the scale of positions such as undergraduate research assistants and laboratory assistants should be significantly expanded, encouraging students to "enter topics early, enter labs early, and enter teams early," tempering their ability to solve complex practical problems through "live-fire" practice [5].
Dual-Wheel Drive: Possessing both Soft and Hard Power
Achieving high-quality employment requires graduates to possess comprehensive competitiveness that is "both soft and hard, with well-rounded development." To this end, universities should focus on building a dual-wheel-drive cultivation mechanism to comprehensively improve students' professional competence.
In terms of forging "hard power," it is necessary to closely align with the strategic goal of building a modernized industrial system. This can be achieved through strengthening project-based learning based on real-world scenarios, supporting student participation in high-level disciplinary competitions, aligning with authoritative industry certification systems, and building highly immersive virtual simulation experimental platforms. These paths will focus on enhancing students' engineering practice capabilities, complex system problem-solving skills, and the ability to rapidly transform new technologies. Especially in the face of the profound changes brought by new technologies such as generative AI, digital literacy should be made a "required course" for all students, with a focus on strengthening their data analysis and human-machine collaboration capabilities in complex digital environments.
At the level of nurturing "soft power," the comprehensive quality evaluation system based on the "Second Classroom Transcript" [6] needs further refinement. This involves scientifically assessing the teamwork abilities, pressure resistance, frustration tolerance, and spirit of humanistic care demonstrated by students in social practice, volunteer services, labor education, and mental health activities, with particular emphasis on cultivating students' psychological resilience to deal with future workplace uncertainties. More importantly, ideological and political education must be deeply integrated with guidance on career perspectives, guiding young students to keep the "Top Priorities of the Nation" [7] in mind, and consciously integrating their personal ideal pursuits into the cause of the Party and the state. Graduates should be actively encouraged and supported to go to key areas in urgent need by the state, to difficult and remote areas, and to the grassroots frontline to establish their careers.
Precise Service: Uninterrupted Whole-Process Empowerment
Facing personalized and diverse employment needs, university employment services must transition from centralized promotion and activity organization during the graduation season to precise accompaniment and empowerment support covering the entire university duration.
Advance the pre-positioning and whole-process integration of career education. Systemic career awakening and exploration education should be carried out from the moment freshmen enter the school, helping students establish clear self-awareness and an accurate understanding of the professional world early on. This guides them to scientifically plan their academic paths, achieving a fundamental shift from passively reacting to employment to actively planning a career.
Strengthen the categorization and precision of employment guidance. For student groups with different career preferences and characteristics—such as those "seeking stability" (e.g., civil service, public institutions, state-owned enterprises), those "aiming for the new" (e.g., scientific and technological innovation enterprises, strategic emerging industries), and those "starting businesses"—universities should provide differentiated and refined guidance services, skills training, and exclusive resource links, significantly improving the pertinence and effectiveness of counseling.
Promote the diversification and ecosystem-building of market expansion. Actively expand "new tracks" for employment in strategic emerging industries, "specialized, refined, differential, and innovative" [8] enterprises, and local key industrial clusters. Establish long-term stable cooperative relationships with high-quality human resources agencies, industrial parks, and industry associations to jointly build a healthy and vibrant employment market ecosystem. Simultaneously, great importance must be attached to and standardized guidance provided for "new forms of employment" and "flexible employment," providing necessary policy interpretation and rights protection for graduates employed via platforms.
Promote the intelligent upgrading of empowerment and assistance work. Relying on big data technology to build smart employment platforms, establish "digital professional portraits" of graduates, and use algorithms to mine potential opportunities, thereby achieving intelligent matching between job requirements and graduate job intentions—reaching the leap from "people looking for jobs" to "jobs looking for people." For groups with employment difficulties, strictly implement "one person, one policy" digital ledgers, providing continuous, warm, and meticulous personalized consultation, skills reinforcement, and job recommendation services to ensure that employment support and services are "uninterrupted" and effectively secure the bottom line of employment.