The second half of the year represents a critical window for enhancing the quality and effectiveness of annual employment efforts. Confronting the new realities of structural shifts and supply-demand mismatches in the job market, the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, during its meeting to plan H2 economic work, stressed the need to strengthen support for key groups seeking employment and to safeguard the rights of flexible workers and those in new forms of employment.

The demand for new occupations is surging. As new quality productive forces are rapidly cultivated and expanded, with the digital economy, advanced manufacturing, and green industries flourishing, and traditional industries accelerating their digital and intelligent transformation, the occupational landscape and job requirements within the labor market are continuously evolving. Since August, several leading internet companies have launched campus recruitment drives for the class of 2027 graduates. For example, Xiaomi Group's demand for AI-related positions has grown by 50% year-on-year; ByteDance is tilting its recruitment focus towards technology and product roles, significantly boosting its AI talent reserves; Tencent has added multiple AI positions, including AI Full-Stack Engineers, Agent Development Engineers, and AI Application Engineers; and at Baidu's campus recruitment, AI-related roles account for over 90%, with a focus on cultivating versatile AI professionals. Simultaneously, it has become routine for new professions and job types to be included in the official occupational catalog. In July this year, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MOHRSS) announced plans to add 12 new professions, including Digital Twin Engineering Technicians, Embodied Intelligent Robot Application Technicians, and Sports Data Analysts, along with new job types like Low-Altitude Logistics Officers, Intelligent Agent Developers, New Energy Vehicle Inspectors, and Age-Friendly Renovation Designers.

National occupational standards serve as the definitive benchmark for skills assessment. Alongside the emergence of these new professions, China has issued over 50 national occupational standards this year alone. "The newly revised national occupational standards are characterized by three key focuses: meeting the rapid development needs of new professions, addressing the demand for urgently needed talent in key sectors, and fulfilling the need for skilled personnel in livelihood-related fields," stated Zhai Tao, Deputy Director of the MOHRSS Vocational Capacity Building Department. These standards not only provide workers with a clear direction for career development but also offer a basis for advancing their vocational skill levels. Issuing these standards incentivizes workers to continuously enhance their professional capabilities and competitiveness, truly realizing the principle that higher skills lead to greater rewards.

Talent assessment must also keep pace with the changing nature of work; the newer the profession, the more talent evaluation needs to break free from conventional paths. Recently, Guizhou Province's industry-education-evaluation skills ecosystem for the data annotation sector was officially launched at the Bainiaohe Digital Town in Qiannan Prefecture. Sheng Hua, founder and CEO of Mengdong Technology, the "chain leader" enterprise for Guizhou's data annotation industry, noted that traditional talent assessment models overemphasize theory and undervalue practical skills, creating a disconnect from the real-world demands of frontline data annotation projects. This new ecosystem establishes project performance evaluation, defense-based certification, and skills competitions as core assessment dimensions, comprehensively determining skill levels based on workers' actual project outcomes, defense capabilities, and competition performance—an evaluation orientation that more closely aligns with actual enterprise production and employment needs.

Reflecting the warmth of people's livelihoods, recruitment demand in emerging industries serves as a barometer for the forefront of industrial development, but it cannot encompass the employment needs of the majority of workers. Understanding the specific job-seeking challenges of different groups and promoting effective job matching requires extending efforts into the front-end of training and employment services. Judging by the progress of public employment service agencies across various regions, many localities are moving away from traditional, indiscriminate recruitment fairs to improve employment quality for 2026 college graduates who have not yet found work and unemployed youth aged 16-24. They are implementing order-based training, list-based placement, and precise matching, steering young job seekers towards certification-based employment and informed career choices. For instance, Sichuan Province, capitalizing on the window period from August to October for job hunting and skill building, is launching a three-month intensive skills training campaign for 2026 college graduates and other youth. The training includes "micro-classes" for skill exploration and special programs for new fields. During the training period, special recruitment events and job referrals are organized concurrently, with quality market-based HR service agencies brought in for precise job matching. To date, the first batch of training has planned 306 classes, expected to train over 12,000 individuals.

Migrant workers are also receiving targeted assistance. Leveraging rural revitalization and common prosperity initiatives, various regions are deeply tapping into local resources, extending entire industry chains involving specialty agriculture, deep processing of agricultural products, and rural cultural tourism, thereby facilitating the return of many migrant workers to employment in their hometowns. Recently, Wang Yuming, who runs a shop near a school in Jiange County, Guangyuan City, Sichuan Province, has entered his peak business season. However, foot traffic alone doesn't guarantee a thriving business, especially for a visually impaired person like Wang, who needs professional guidance to enhance his shop's operations. In recent years, Jiange County, in collaboration with Shangcheng District in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, has launched the "Bangbang Stall" project as part of their east-west cooperation initiative. Leveraging the industrial advantages of small commodity production in eastern regions, the project connects with source factories in Zhejiang for unified supply, while also organizing training for local low-income groups to open small shops or set up stalls, ultimately helping them achieve self-employment. Zan Xudong, the instructor responsible for training Wang Yuming, told reporters that the training courses use easy-to-remember sales formulas to help participants quickly grasp business skills.

Purifying the market ecosystem is also crucial. Stabilizing employment requires not only expanding positions and improving quality but also optimizing the environment and protecting rights. Young people with limited life experience, migrant workers with relatively constrained rights-protection channels, and vulnerable groups with weaker employment competitiveness are highly susceptible to becoming victims of false recruitment schemes and labor rights violations. A fair and orderly human resources market is the prerequisite for key groups to seek jobs with peace of mind and work with confidence. Currently, MOHRSS departments are continuously standardizing the order of the human resources market nationwide, repeatedly exposing typical cases, promptly issuing warnings about recruitment traps, and focusing on cracking down on illegal and non-compliant behaviors such as false recruitment, employment discrimination, "training loans," and "rigged recruitment." Huang Junmei, a second-level inspector from the MOHRSS Employment Promotion Department, stated that graduates should enhance their risk awareness, seek jobs through public employment service institutions and other legitimate, qualified channels, and carefully scrutinize and cautiously select suspicious recruitment information. If they encounter illegal or non-compliant practices such as employment discrimination or false recruitment, they can file complaints with MOHRSS departments to protect their legitimate employment rights and interests.

Upholding the bottom line of labor rights and safeguarding the hard-earned wages of migrant workers is also a key focus of H2 employment work. Leveraging digital supervision tools, many localities have achieved real-time monitoring of corporate employment practices and rapid resolution of rights-protection claims, effectively addressing long-standing issues such as difficulties in rights protection, evidence collection, and slow handling. For example, Ningbo City in Zhejiang Province has iteratively upgraded its "Yongxin Jingguan" digital application, continuously advancing the pilot work of the MOHRSS joint mediation mechanism for wage disputes of migrant workers in construction projects. Starting from both wage disputes and mediation resolution, Ningbo is building a joint mediation mechanism centered on pricing, algorithms, and supervision to enhance the protection of migrant workers' labor remuneration rights.