Explorating Causes and Countermeasures of the Employment Difficulties for College Graduates in the New Era

This paper focuses on the increasingly prominent problem of employment difficulties that college graduates confront. Through analyzing the major causes of the employment difficulties and investigating the impact that the society, universities, families and individuals have on college graduates’ employment, the paper proposes some solutions to the problem from several aspects: the government measures, talent-cultivating adjustment of universities, the changes of employment concepts as well as mindset adjustment from the perspective of families and individuals, and the ideological innovations of employers, etc. In the new era when the national economy develops rapidly, the national economic restructuring and the enrollment increase in institutions of higher learning makes the employment difficulties for college students even more prominent, which has become a serious social problem. There are a lot of reasons contributing to this issue, such as social elements, tertiary education, family influences and individual factors. It is extremely urgent to solve this problem in order to efficiently make use of the talents and promote further development of the national economy. Cause Analysis of the Employment Difficulties in the New Era Economic restructuring has increased college students’ employment pressure. In the new normal situations of economic development, our country has been constantly adjusting the economic structure in order to defuse the excessive production capacity and get rid of the backward productivity, causing a proportion of enterprise employees to lose their jobs; the unemployed people pour in to the labor market and become competitors of college graduates [1]. At the same time, as the pressure of the economic downturn is becoming greater, some enterprises confront difficulties in production and management; as a result, their recruitment capacity is insufficient and there are less and less job vacancies. In addition, institutions of higher learning have been implementing the national policy of enrollment increase, so there are more and more college graduates pouring in to the job market every year. According to the statistics, there were more than 1.4 million college graduates in the year 2002, and the number soared up to 7.95 million in 2017. The sharp increase of college graduates has far exceeded the growth rate of the economy, intensifying the conflict between the total supply and demand in the job market. Furthermore, the enrollment increase also caused the imbalance between the social needs and universities’ specialty structure and talent structure. As a supporting power of sustainable economic development, the development of the specialty structure in institutions of higher learning should adapt to the changes in the economic structure and provide all kinds of qualified and equivalent labor force and professionals for scientific and technological progress and sustainable economic development. But since the implementation of the enrollment increase, many colleges and universities didn’t have scientific demand forecasting and planning for cultivating talents, and the major setup was inconsistent with social needs. Consequently, college graduates’ specialized knowledge structure was in disharmony with the social demand. What’s worse, colleges and universities increased the enrollment in their regular majors, especially in the hot majors, and set up many new majors in order to enroll more students. When these students graduated, they found that 7th International Conference on Education and Management (ICEM 2017) Copyright © 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Economics, Business and Management Research, volume 53