China has made unprecedented investments to bring education to the younger generation over the past 30 years, but now faces a new challenge: ensuring the population has the skills to thrive in a fast-changing economy.
Today, 91 percent of secondary education teachers hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, up from only 24 percent in 2000. The number of college admissions soared to 9.1 million in 2019, from 3.7 million in 2000. Although gaps in quality and access must still be filled, the system meets the Chinese industrial economy’s needs.
But China is rapidly evolving to an economy driven by consumption, services and innovation: a post-industrial economy. Transforming China’s talent-development systems is necessary to turn the world’s largest workforce into a nation of lifelong learners.
Digital technologies and automation are on the rise, changing the skill types that will be in demand. Digitization and automation have accelerated amid COVID-19, therefore the need to reskill and potentially change occupations may have become even more urgent.
New McKinsey Global Institute research indicates that 516 billion hours of work activities, assuming each worker works eight hours daily, equivalent to 87 days on average per worker, may be displaced by automation by 2030 in a midpoint adoption scenario. While demand for physical and manual skills could fall 18 percent in the period to 2030, demand for technological skills could rise by 51 percent. Up to 220 million Chinese workers — about 30 percent of the workforce — may need to change occupations by 2030. Particular attention must be paid to China’s millions of migrant workers who tend to be low-skilled and low-paid with few resources for training.
China needs an ambitious plan for reskilling centered on the “three Es”: everyone, everthing, and everywhere. Everyone needs access to training, notably the nation’s 775 million workers. By 2030, that implies that the system should accommodate three times as many people enrolled in the education system today.
Content must offer everything — the broad capabilities that equip Chinese people for a fast-evolving economy, notably high cognitive skills (including critical thinking and decision-making), social and emotional skills (including interpersonal skills and leadership) and technical skills (including advanced data analysis) will be in demand. This requires investment in developing different content beyond traditional textbooks, including case studies and hands-on projects as well as new delivery approaches including participatory learning and experiential training.
Skills development should be available everywhere to all throughout their lives. According to official statistics, only 3 million migrant workers out of a total of 291 million took vocational and technical programs in 2019. A rural-urban divide in funding and teachers’ qualifications must be overcome.
Based on surveys of best practices in China and around the world, we identified four levers around which pilot projects can be designed to test what works and what does not.
First, digital technologies. Their adoption can enable more engaging multichannel learning and teaching. These technologies can empower content creators to deliver “micro curricula”, and make content delivery more exciting and personalized by using tools including artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, and gamification. More than 900 million people could benefit.
Second, a collaborative skills development ecosystem. Expanded public-private partnerships can help address the gap between workforce skills and employers’ needs. Enterprises can play a more significant role in vocational education, the design of curricula, training and recruiting.
Third, an enhanced vocational education track. Workers need flexibility in returning to school, receiving retraining, and pursuing higher-skill jobs. China could create multiple entry points while making vocational education more attractive to prospective high school students, for instance by expanding a “3+4” model that enables them to go directly to application-oriented universities. Vocational trainers could collaborate more with companies to gain up-to-date knowledge, and more company representatives could come to vocational schools to teach.
Last, shifting attitudes and incentivizing change. Backing up such transformation requires changing attitudes — for everyone to “own” their lifelong learning journeys by using information platforms and a micro-credential system to navigate career options and skills-development paths. Companies can strengthen the provision of training to develop their workers, potentially with government financial support in the form of co-funding or tax incentives.
Skills transformation of this scale and pace will be unprecedented. It will require substantial investment, but also a comprehensive approach with the participation of national and local governments, educational institutions, and, crucially, companies.
China’s continued prosperity and economic dynamism as well as its citizen’s livelihoods hinge on wide-ranging reform to the nation’s skills, and the work must start now. As the saying goes: “It takes 10 years to grow a tree, but 100 years to cultivate people.”
Jonathan Woetzel is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Shanghai office and the director of McKinsey Global Institute. Jeongmin Seong is a partner in McKinsey Global Institute, McKinsey & Co. The authors contributed this article to China Watch, a think tank powered by China Daily.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.