The global race for talent: Are you ready for it or not?

Be aware of the world, understand what is going on around you, do more than study…

This was the key message from Mr. Chenggang Zhou, COO of Beijing New Oriental Education & Technology Group Inc., to a captive audience of Chinese undergraduate and post-graduate students and alumni at the University of Liverpool (Liverpool) on Friday, 3 October. The event was exclusively sponsored by the University’s Chinese Student and Scholars Association (CSSA).

　 　Mr. Chenggang Zhou sharing advice with Chinese students at the University of Liverpool - New Oriental Vision Overseas Consulting event sponsored by the University's Chinese Student and Scholar Association.

While Mr. Zhou shared his own academic and professional experiences – a master’s candidate in the 1990s pursuing a degree in Mass Communication from Macquarie University in Australia to his role as a journalist at the BBC in London – he also shared his reasons for returning to China so that he could support the entrepreneurial efforts of his fellow high school classmate to help more Chinese students gain access to greater educational achievements, especially internationally. Importantly, Mr. Zhou’s message was not only on how Chinese students could gain access to leading institutions in the world or secure jobs at prestigious firms or Fortune 500 companies, but also on how students can create and facilitate their own academic and professional pathways by fully utilizing their time while outside of China.

As hundreds of thousands of Chinese students continue leave China each year to pursue degrees from non-Chinese institutions, studying abroad is no longer limited to just the academic or financial elite, but more and more accessible to a wider range of student profiles. Moreover, where studying abroad used to be seen as an opportunity for future immigration, now, at unprecedented levels, Chinese graduates are choosing to return to the Mainland for a multitude of reasons such as economic opportunity and growth, cultural familiarity and comfort, and increasingly, connecting their home country with their newly adopted world.

As Mr. Zhou succinctly stated in his address to students at Liverpool, globalization has essentially shrunk the world so that we are able to communicate and operate at a faster rate and deeper levels. Yet, the result of this is that we need individuals who are not only intellectually and professionally capable, but highly culturally competent; to be able to adeptly shift between cultural ideologies and barriers, to bring together people, organizations, and societies, which would have struggled previously without this cultural fluency and understanding.

Cultural awareness is considered a “soft skill” – an area often left out in the minds of Chinese students in the pursuit of the degree. Yet, in every piece of news, report or academic literature that talks about the rise of the “global war on talent”, about future employability, soft skill development and astuteness is what will often separate the wheat from the chaff. This, Mr. Zhou says is an opportunity for Chinese students who have the benefit of the study abroad experience and the foreign (non-Chinese) degree. But, it is also a challenge for them as they are accustomed to an education system so focused on academic achievement, rankings, test scores and grades.

University of Liverpool Chinese Student and Scholar Association (CSSA) Event Poster along with students who provided their thoughtful views and questions during the event.

As he chronicled the history of Chinese citizens studying abroad, Mr. Zhou shared the example of Wing Yung (Hong Rong in Chinese pinyin), a student from Hong Kong and the first Chinese student to graduate from a U.S. University (Yale College, 1854). Yung returned home to China (during the Qing Dynasty) his degree in hand, and with his experience and view of the “outside world”, began helping other Chinese students acquire the same experience and opportunity he had. Even at that time, he recognized that increased knowledge of the outside world would only enhance, not hinder, the development of an individual, a community, a country.

In his closing, Mr. Zhou encouraged Chinese students sitting in the room to challenge their paradigms, be curious about the world, and in turn share with others their own stories and experiences. This is the purpose of education – in and out of the classroom: to elevate one’s knowledge beyond textbooks and readings, to excel as a contributor to the professional and academic communities, and to elevate China/Chinese society cross-culturally on the global stage seamlessly.