Shanghai job fair offers expats a foot in the door_美文

Shanghai job fair offers expats a foot in the door

To get a job in Shanghai, 26-year-old Elyse Stone from the United States depicted herself on her name card as "an ambitious global marketer".

She was prepared to start her career on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder.

"I expected to receive a monthly salary of between 10,000 and 12,000 yuan ($1,600 and $1,900) when I started to seek job opportunities in Shanghai in June 2011," said Stone, who is now a marketing executive for Sino United Health, a physical therapy clinic.

Stone is one of a growing number of expatriates, especially those with good educational and professional backgrounds, seeking work opportunities in Shanghai as more multinational companies are focusing on localization to lower costs.

"The number of expats coming to work in Shanghai has grown significantly ever since the European debt crisis hit in late 2009," said Huang Hong, deputy director of the Shanghai Foreign Experts Affairs Bureau.

"There has been a tremendous increase in the mobility of talent nowadays. If the economy in other countries is not as good, overseas talent is very likely to seek a chance in China."

More than 81,000 expats working in Shanghai have a foreign expert certificate - about one-sixth of the total number in China. About 1,000 additional foreign experts are recruited in Shanghai every year, officials from the Shanghai Municipal Human Resources and Social Security Bureau said, at a job fair catering to expats in Shanghai on Saturday.