NO longer dominated by language teachers, job positions in other industries for foreigners in China have seen rapid increases in recent years, according to figures from the 2019 Job Fair for Foreigners in Beijing.

Job openings in the service sector, IT and media industries, including journalists, brand and communication managers and software engineers, make up nearly half of the job vacancies at the fair, which was organized by the Foreign Talent Research Center and the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs on Sunday.

The fair attracted more than 500 expats and offered about 1,000 job vacancies in multiple sectors, the China Daily reported yesterday.

Foreign jobseekers with Mandarin proficiency are likely to get more pay. “Positions that require fluent spoken and written Mandarin tend to pay more than the same jobs without the language requirement,” said Yang Jiayin, project manager of the research center.

More than 50 percent of jobseekers are from European countries, mainly Spain and Portugal, and about 25 percent are from Asian countries, with a majority from India, according to data collected at the Beijing job fair from the previous 10 years.

The income gap between foreigners and Chinese employees in the same positions has reduced in past decades as salaries paid to Chinese have risen faster than expat salaries, Yang added.

In 2018, China issued approximately 336,000 work permits to foreigners, and over 950,000 foreigners were working in the country as of the end of last year.

(Xinhua)