A Trip to the Job Fair

This post was extracted from my early NetEase blog. NetEase Blog is no longer operating, but looking back, these words are still quite interesting, so I decided to move them over as intact as possible. It is mainly kept as a record; after all, it is from a long time ago, so the quality of the writing, images, and links may all be affected.

This post was originally published on February 26, 2011. I was about 22 years old at the time and was studying in college.

Today I accompanied classmate S to the Everbright Convention & Exhibition Center to attend what was said to be a very large job fair. We set out at nine o'clock, and by the time we arrived it was already noon. Although there were only a little more than two hours left before it ended, the job fair site was still packed with people.

Original image

The entire job fair site was crowded with people who had come to apply for jobs.

Because I still had a relatively good job, today I mainly came to look at the market. Among the whole job fair, 20% of the jobs could not be asked about because of education requirements, and 60% of the positions did not want fresh graduates. So in the end, only 20% were actually worth looking at. After excluding some jobs unrelated to our majors, we really did not find many that were truly suitable for us.

The sentence I heard most often during the whole process was, "Sorry, we do not want fresh graduates, only people who have already received their diploma." These words still made us feel a slight chill. With no better option, we just looked around casually. My classmate was more interested in finance and consulted several financial institutions, including Pacific Insurance, and some real-estate sales jobs. Although the pay was still fairly good, I felt it did not have much meaning. I was still more focused on "major-related" work.

After walking around for a day, I was still quite tired. The conclusion can be summed up in one sentence: education is the stepping stone, experience determines how much salary you earn, and ability determines how long you can stay at a company. So it is still better to work hard to study some useful knowledge, and only then discuss whether a job is good or bad.