The best place to find a job in China is to use your personal contacts who work for a company that needs someone with your exact skill set. If you aren’t blessed with such guanxi (connection), then the Internet will do. American and multinational companies advertise heavily on www.monster.com, while Chinese companies tend to use www.zhaopin.com, but you might need a little Mandarin to navigate this site. If you’re already in China, you can also check out the classifieds in your city’s English magazines. Such listings are more likely to be part-time or contract work.
Foreign-Invested Enterprises, as international firms are called, employ about 85 percent of the expat workforce who aren’t working as teachers. About 40 percent of the jobs have been in sales and marketing; about 20 percent in engineering; 10 percent in management, including accounting and finance; and IT jobs make up about 5 percent. Early on expats primarily worked for foreign firms, but more and more are hiring in at local firms, even the State-Owned Enterprises. About 15 percent of the non-teaching expats work for Chinese companies, primarily employed as engineers or managers in high-tech manufacturing firms. To a business, the ideal expatriate worker has the right mix of hard skills, soft skills, and language skills. Hard skills in demand include technical skills (including both IT and complex manufacturing processes), financial skills (including CPA credentials and expertise with GAAP), international marketing skills, and legal skills, especially lawyers familiar with international trade laws.
Having the right hard skills and credentials may land you an interview, but the soft skills like flexibility, maturity, people skills, and cross-cultural competency are what will help you secure a job offer, especially sales and marketing jobs that entail regular communication with Chinese customers. Not everyone can cope with the stress of living and working in a cross-cultural setting, so lots of expats end up going home before their contracted time is up. Human resource personnel know the average Joe won’t cut it in China, so expect to be scrutinized heavily before being offered the job. The best-paying jobs require a conversant level of Mandarin. Positions that require Mandarin fluency tend to pay as much as $30,000 more than the same job without the language requirement. Even if you aren’t quite fluent, any Chinese language ability will be beneficial in this job market.
