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Recently, the movie "Reverse Life" has become a big hit and the box office has exceeded 200 million.

The film mainly tells the story of Gao Zhilei (played by Xu Zheng), a middle-aged programmer with a high level of education who is unemployed. He went from being a programmer to being laid off and had to work as a delivery man to support his family. He was forced to accept the identity dislocation from white-collar to blue-collar.

Image source: TikTok @电影逆行人生

The film's focus on employment involution is consistent with the intensified competition in the job market, frequent salary cuts and layoffs, and the increasing degree of social involution in recent years.

Especially with the autumn recruitment approaching, many young people are also suffering from employment anxiety. As the joke says:

College students, master students, and doctoral students are endless;

Couriers, delivery men, and security guards are all fully staffed.

A previous survey conducted by the Social Survey Center of China Youth Daily and Questionnaire.com on 1,334 job-seeking college graduates showed thatNearly 90% of fresh graduates surveyed believe that the "substance" of finding a job is more important than the "appearance"。

In the past, respectable and stable jobs were popular.Many young people pay more attention to various "inside factors" such as salary, personal preferences, etc. when choosing a job, and blue-collar jobs are gradually becoming the choice of more graduates.

Netizen: Is the era of the comprehensive rise of blue-collar workers really coming?

on the other hand,More and more "highly educated" people are also beginning to actively choose "high-skilled" jobs.

Cui Di studied landscape architecture at Tongji University in Shanghai, then went to Europe to study for a master's degree in hotel management. He is now the head chef of two fusion restaurants in Shanghai. Some people think this is a "waste of academic qualifications", while others believe that "life is a wilderness, not a track" and should not be confined to academic qualifications.

The numerous choices may be a reflection of the imbalance between the current education system and employment structure. The seemingly "unwise" choice seems to have become a kind of "lucky" in today's high-pressure, "involutionary" society.

In an era when "high education" is becoming increasingly obsolete, is it more important to have high skills or is high education still favored?

1

The idea of ​​"focusing on academic qualifications rather than skills" is fading

In the past, both at the social and family levels, people were more inclined to invest in "high education" rather than "high skills".

If a person with a "highly educated" background chooses to switch from a "white-collar" to a "blue-collar" job, society tends to view this person as a failure in career development.

But now there are more and more cases where people actively make this choice.

Chen studied undergraduate at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and obtained his master's degree from Renmin University of China. Three years ago, Chen resigned from an Internet company and entered the high-end housekeeping industry, becoming a senior housekeeper with an annual salary of about 500,000 yuan.

Lan Yu studied history at Sun Yat-sen University, a 985 university, and received her master's degree from the School of Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. After graduation, she chose to work as a live-in nanny for a wealthy couple.

Image source: Xiaohongshu@小蓝鱼饼

Although most people think that the profession of nanny is low-level, Lan Yu does not feel that she is inferior here. She believes that she is respected by her employer on a daily basis and sometimes feels more like a member of the family.

Xiao C, who has a postgraduate degree in Fashion Design from Wuhan Textile University, is now an agent in the nanny sector.

Little C said,Companies need highly educated people mainly because they have high cultural levels, can improve their professional skills quickly, and can communicate more easily with high-end customers.

In addition, the phenomenon of "famous schools clustering" also appeared on the real estate agent display page of a certain intermediary website.

Among them are graduates from prestigious universities such as Peking University, Fudan University, Zhejiang University, Wuhan University and Nanjing University.

In a documentary called "Middle Life", the protagonist of the fifth episode "I am a 985" is Zhang Yonggang, who graduated with a master's degree from the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics and is currently a real estate agent at a real estate company in Beijing.

In this industry, he is not regarded as superior because of his high education. In his own words, "The 985 label is useless. What matters is being able to sell houses."

Image source: TV series "Little Joy"

Under the dual influence of the real environment and personal choices, the labels of graduates from prestigious universities and those with master's and doctoral degrees are no longer the "stepping stone" to employment.

At the same time, industries such as real estate agents, internet celebrities, insurance brokers, and housekeeping are rapidly becoming professionalized.

According to the China New Employment Research Center"2023 China Blue-collar Employment Research Report" states that the blue-collar group in China's 747 million employed population has a size of 400 million, accounting for more than 53%.

The gap in average monthly salaries between blue-collar and white-collar groups is gradually narrowing.The average monthly salary of blue-collar workers has increased year by year, from 2,684 yuan in 2012 to 6,043 yuan in 2023, an increase of 2.26 times.

In contrast, the average monthly income of white-collar workers has only increased by 1.3 times. Even after excluding inflation, the actual average monthly salary of blue-collar workers has reached 1.85 times that of 10 years ago.

Image source: 2023 China Blue-Collar Employment Research Report

It is not difficult to understand why the traditional concept of "focusing on academic qualifications rather than skills" has begun to fade.

2

Are blue-collar workers sliding from passive to active choice?

The number of college graduates in 2024 hit a record high, but news of layoffs and recruitment cuts at major companies continued to come in.

Many highly educated graduates choose to reject job offers and become temporary "vagrants" because they are dissatisfied with the salary, work content or feel there is no room for development.

Corresponding to the phenomenon of "highly educated people unemployed" is the phenomenon ofThere is a huge gap in skilled talent in key areas of our country, and high-skilled talent is very popular in the job market.

NO.1

Blue-collar workers in short supply

From the perspective of labor demand,The new economy represented by new energy vehicles, new consumption, enterprise digitalization, and intelligent manufacturing is rising rapidly.Companies are increasingly demanding highly educated and skilled personnel, and their salaries are also rising.

Previously popular white-collar occupations such as finance, real estate, education, and the Internet have been hit hard in the past few years, with corporate demand weakening and salaries declining.

In particular, the arrival of the AI ​​era is like a watershed. Faced with the reality that many "white-collar" occupations may "disappear forever", the high skills possessed by "blue-collar" workers have become even more popular in the job market.

In developed countries, due to the widespread shortage of skilled jobs, the vast majority of blue-collar workers also have considerable incomes.

NBC News reported that starting from January 2020, the demand for software development and marketing positions in the US job market had risen, but it has declined rapidly in the past two years. However, blue-collar positions represented by construction and nursing have shown a trend of long-term prosperity and strong market demand.

According to Statistics Canada, the average hourly wage for gas workers, auto mechanics, welders and other jobs in British Columbia (for example, Vancouver) is higher than that of office workers, exceeding RMB 150.

People began to realize that instead of working as PPT workers in an office cubicle, it would be better to learn a skill and do the job directly.

Image source: TV series "Chicken Feathers Flying to the Sky"

Therefore, a new phenomenon is that more and more young people are taking the initiative to become blue-collar workers, such as manicurists, food deliverymen, online car-hailing drivers, welders, etc.

NO.2

"New Blue Collar" may become a "new trend"

Under the cruel reality of imbalanced employment supply and demand structure and the depreciation of academic qualifications,Those with "high education" are also trying hard to take off "Kong Yiji's long gown" and trying to seek practical skills to change their employment situation.

A housekeeping service company in Shenzhen has many service providers who were born after 1995 or even 2000. Some of its employees even graduated from Tsinghua University. They are optimistic about the future development prospects of the housekeeping industry, so they want to develop further in this industry.

Image source: South Window

At the same time, the development of digital technology has also brought new opportunities for blue-collar workers.

When "high education" and "high skills" are combined, the connotation of blue-collar workers is also quietly changing."New blue-collar workers" have higher technical skills and higher incomes, and are gradually becoming a new trend in the job market.

On July 31, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security announced to the public: cloud network intelligent operation and maintenance personnel, generative artificial intelligence system application personnel, user growth operator, network anchor, etc.19 new professions, and 28 new occupations such as live broadcast recruiters have been included in the National Occupational Classification.

For college students who are about to graduate or have just graduated, they are also beginning to think about finding new employment directions in the skills track.

3

Break the inherent framework and choose a life without limits

In the past, traditional views equated white-collar workers with high income, high status, and high education, and blue-collar workers with low wages, poor working environment, and high work intensity.

Therefore, under the understanding that "all things are inferior, only reading is superior", many people hold the belief that "reading can change destiny" and have been "rolled" step by step to the present.

However, things change over time. The days when getting into college meant a good job are over.

On the practical level,The increasingly severe "labor shortage", "brain-body inversion" and "the speed of studying cannot keep up with the speed of depreciation of academic qualifications" and other phenomena have suggested that the spring of blue-collar workers has arrived.

Nowadays, the halo of elites in big companies has faded, the wave of entrepreneurship has calmed down, further study is no longer a safe plan, and taking civil service exams is like walking on a single-plank bridge.

There has never been any standardized life template for us to copy. In this era full of opportunities and challenges, we might as well abandon our inherent career stereotypes, recognize the opportunities brought about by changes in social structure, and bravely step into our own new track.

Image source: TikTok @电影逆行人生

Although you don’t know what will happen in the next moment of your life, you still don’t know what your destiny will give you in the next moment.

But as Shi Tiesheng said in "Good Luck Design": "After a great disaster, people should not lose their sharpness, should not lose their enthusiasm,You are calm but still burning, you are stable but more powerful."

No matter which path in life you take, you can start at any time.

Before the structural problems in society are resolved, if we give full play to individual initiative, there will be a way when we walk and there will be wind when we run.

References:

[1] Senior Management Consultant: As the labor shortage grows, are blue-collar workers becoming more popular?

[2] Workplace Sharing: Blue Collar or White Collar? Uncovering the Workplace Trends of 2024

[3] Kan Tianxia Lab: Under the new employment model, should we invest in higher education or higher skills?

[4] Guyu data: Blue-collar workers are earning more and more: a nanny's annual salary easily exceeds 100,000 yuan, and a post-95s nail artist can earn 8,000 yuan a month