Job hunting in Shanghai

I received a call from a friend in Ningbo today. I was a little surprised that she wants to come to shanghai to seek a job. Whether it’s just a joke or not, nonetheless, I want to say some words about it, because I have been full of sense of job hunting in shanghai and have suffered impressed of it.

Back to today of last year, however, Ningbo is not suitable city to start my IT career path, I went to Shanghai alone finally. Although I had been signed the offer of my current company, I had no idea about my future life in shanghai. I felt excited to be graduated and nervous about my career life. The drawback is that I have little friends in Shanghai. Even worse, I didn’t graduate from a top university in China while Shanghai is a city attracting top students from top universities throughout China. It is very easy to imagine that the competition is extremely fierce here. It is not easy for a new graduated student with no working experience especially from ordinary university to find a good job in Shanghai. Often enough, you even have no interview opportunity. In a smaller city like Ningbo, your competitor is from Ningbo or the province while in a large city like Shanghai, your competitor come from throughout the country. So before you get to Shanghai, you should be well prepared and have the courage to face these talent competitors.
I remember that I send about 100 more copies of my resume and wrote about 80 application emails to the software companies in Shanghai. Finally, I got an offer. It seems unbelievable, but it’s truly happened to me. So tenacity and persistence is important too, I think.
After joining my current company, I realized that my poor basis of the Computer Science knowledge. I was shocked that there so many things I should learn in the university but I didn’t. There are so many things I should know but I didn’t. So from that time, I decided to fill the vacancies day by day. I began to read the following books:
Introduction to Algorithm,
Design Pattern,
Thinking in C++,
Effective C++,
More Effective C++,
Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment,
…
I try to improve my English, read English website and books and even write English blogs. I know my English is not good enough and English is important working in a city such like Shanghai. In my opinion, if you want to join a good software company, the basis knowledge of C.S. is very important, besides, English is important too. My job hunting experience tells me that great companies do not care how many programming language you know. What they really concern is the ability when you solving a problem, the potential you have and the things you can do in the future. So Courage is not enough! You should be able to keep on challenging yourself.
So you may wonder what these companies I just mentioned as great company are. There are many software development companies in Shanghai and good companies are often foreign companies. Entering the following companies may be a good chance and may give you a good career path in the IT industry:
SAP Labs China,
MSN CDC,
Microsoft ATC,
Intel Asia-Pacific R&D,
IBM CSDL,
Autodesk,
UBI soft
…
These companies are often hard to join in. Work hard and be well prepared may change the situation. Please note that there are also many non-technical positions in these companies.
I don’t know the detail of other industries in Shanghai. I just know most white collars in shanghai are finding jobs in the following websites:
http://www.chinahr.com
http://www.51job.com
http://www.zhaopin.com
Besides, if you have friends working in shanghai for big companies, such as Microsoft, they can provide you the open positions information and recommend you to their manager. This is a more effective way.
Good luck, my friends!