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Learning to be a civil servant

By Wang Xiaotian (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-01-18 08:05

Another graduate surnamed Wang, 24, who works at Shanghai accounting firm, had another reason to take the exam. "Nowadays, most companies with an official background or public institutions adopt the civil servant entrance exam as their recruitment threshold. The two subjects have prevailed in all kinds of exams," she said.

Foreseeing a continued rise in demand, Yi, from Huatu, is readjusting its development strategy to better suit new trends in the industry and improve its brand quality.

"The success of online services and distance-learning courses have already shown an inexorable new trend in the education industry, especially in the civil servant training sector," he said.

Last year, Huatu's school revenues rose by five times year-on-year. Total revenue for the company increased by 80 to 90 percent over the same period. Yi anticipates the increasing rate of online education will continue this year.

Huatu also plans to cash in on professional English training in accounting and law, as well as teaching Chinese as a foreign language globally through the Internet by cooperating with Chinese training schools abroad.

Li Yongxin, from Zhonggong, prefers to consolidate the company's research and development of face-to-face courses before gambling on other services. "Traditional courses are still the most profitable sector and we will go on upgrading research on it to better cater to individualized demand," he said.

"How can these courses improve people's capability, which is the main focus of the civil servant entrance exam? Probably they are not useful at all to the applicants," said Zeng Xiangquan. In his opinion, the irrational demand was forming a bubble in the industry.

"The courses were not as useful as I assumed. At first I felt good, but later I found what they taught mostly are templates to deal with the exam, such as the so-called "four procedures", "three patterns", and "six main angles", which confine students' flexible thinking and are always resisted by experts who set questions or judge answers," said Chen, adding he would have performed much better if he hadn't registered for his course.

Chen and Wang agreed that the training programs could only polish individuals' skills in taking tests instead of really improving their capability.

"You may get the average score by attending the training courses, but it's impossible to get a competitive score," said Wang. Only those who pay long-term attention to policies accumulate wide knowledge of the country. Learning to think for themselves will result in their efforts being reflected in their exam performance."

Li Yongxin from Zhonggong admitted the short-term courses have obvious flaws. He is promoting a new training program lasting from one to two years to improve candidates' capabilities as the government gets more sophisticated.

Yi said the courses were not designed for taking the exam, but always focused on lifting the administrative aptitude of those sitting the exam in an efficient way. "Many students told me they could think and express themselves in a much clearer way after taking the courses," he said.

According to Yi, some official institutes under the State Council even signed contracts with his company to better train civil servants serving there. "That's because they saw a sustainable training value that we provide to our trainees. Some government organizations have recognized our methods of improving civil servants' capabilities, especially in report and speech writing. We even teach them how to smile," he said.

While Yi and Li are calculating the numbers joining or leaving their courses at the year-end, Chen Chen has yet to find a job. While wandering around at a job fair on campus last December, he saw the stands of Huatu and Zhonggong again. The two companies shocked the graduates because they were offering 150,000 yuan per year for a teaching position, triple the salary of a new civil servant job. Long queues formed before the stands.

"If I passed the paper-based exam and got permission for a face-to-face interview, I would still turn to Huatu or Zhonggong for interview training," said Chen Chen. "Competition is so cruel, and I can't miss out on this precious chance."

This year 738 people are competing for Chen's ideal position. The most competitive position, principal staff member in the Europe division, Ministry of Science and Technology, attracted 4,080 applicants. There is just one vacancy.

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