Vocational education goes to head of the class

Students at a vocational school study practical electronics in Handan, Hebei province, in April. [Photo/XINHUA]

Shift away from private core K-12 programs opens door to whole new learning industry

From the outside, the dozens of classrooms at a Chinese vocational education company in Beijing's Haidian district may not look like the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry from the Harry Potter movies.

But inside, the packed rooms of young people are studying a type of wizardry, even if it is the more down-to-earth kind involved in information technology. The vocational education students are upbeat about learning the intricacies of Java programming, user interface design and other lessons key to the magic of their field.

With China having released a series of guidelines recently to promote the high-quality development of modern vocational education, that market is expected to see further boost.

China aims to build a modern vocational education system by 2025, and by 2035, the country's vocational education is expected to be ranked among the best in the world, according to guidelines jointly released by the general offices of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council, China's Cabinet.

Listed companies and leading enterprises in related sectors are being encouraged to develop vocational education. Vocational schools are also encouraged to work with private businesses to develop infrastructure and training centers together, it said.

"Unlike previous policies, the new guideline mentioned for the first time participation of listed companies, which means that listed companies, even if they are not leading ones, can be involved in developing vocational education," said Xiong Bingqi, director of Beijing-based 21st Century Education Research Institute.

"It also demonstrates the country's determination to nurture more talent, especially high-tech talent in emerging fields, to drive related key industries, which will carry a significance for the construction of a new vocational education market as well as economic development," said Lyu Senlin, founder of Guiding Light Think Tank.

Under the new guideline, industries including advanced manufacturing, new energy, new materials, modern agriculture, modern information technology, biotechnology and artificial intelligence will be top priorities.

Lyu said that it is a favorable policy for education companies as most of them are exploring new ways to survive and thrive again in the aftermath of a guideline for the sector in late July to undertake reform of its business model. The guideline urged all institutions offering tutoring based on school curricula to be registered as nonprofit organizations, which industry insiders said will force businesses that naturally pursue profits toward noncurricular education business endeavors.

Right after the new guideline on vocational education was released on Oct 13, the stocks of a number of listed education companies in the A-share market, including Xueda Education, soared by their daily limit.

A report by market consultancy iResearch said China's vocational education market is expected to hit 390 billion yuan ($61 billion) next year. It is estimated that there will be a shortage of about 1 million professionals in the domestic IT market per year on average.

In fact, a group of companies in the field has announced their transformation from K-12, or kindergarten to 12th grade, education to vocational education, after the country's reform of the K-12 sector in July.

Zuoyebang, a leading online education firm, launched Bufan Class, which means "extraordinary class", to tutor adults in English, finance and accounting. TAL Education Group also announced its new brand Qingzhou and said it will explore the vocational education market.

"To some extent, running a good vocational education market is more important than running more top-class universities. It is more important to alleviate the current social anxiety, under which professional education is inferior to academic pathways and students are unwilling to become skilled talent that may be 'looked down upon'," Xiong added.

Currently in China, general academic high schools and vocational high schools are two major types of schools at the senior secondary level. Students who pass the high-school entrance examination can be admitted to a general academic high school, while those who fail the exam will drop out of school or turn to vocational secondary schools.

Some 6.4 million students were admitted to vocational high schools last year, in sharp contrast to this year, when 16.6 million students had entered secondary vocational schools as of late August, according to the Ministry of Education.

"Potential clients for the vocational education market are not only students, but also comprised of millions of workers and part-time employees seeking new skills to improve themselves, especially given that the country is undergoing a huge industrial upgrading and transformation in the aftermath of the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic," Lyu said.

Zhou Huafei, senior president of teaching research and development at Tarena, a leading IT education provider, said that despite uncertainties created by the pandemic, Chinese companies are in urgent need of professional IT talent with sufficient practical knowledge and technical skills to help them with both basic technological structure and high-end technologies.

"The company has seen a new high in terms of the demand for talent from leading technology and internet firms over the past year, with such talent focusing on emerging strategic industries like artificial intelligence, cloud computing and cybersecurity being the most popular," he said.

Tarena, which has been doing IT training for 20 years, innovated in order to meet new demand from emerging sectors. It worked with Huawei Technologies Co, for instance, to open courses for the HarmonyOS system as Huawei launched the operating system's latest version this year.

For the second quarter, Tarena reported its revenue had soared 75.5 percent year-over-year to 582.3 million yuan ($91.2 million). Revenue in its adult professional education business, which represented 50.3 percent of total revenue, increased 22.3 percent year-over-year.

Tarena also inked a strategic cooperation deal in late July with cybersecurity leader 360 Security Group. The two parties will work together in training cybersecurity engineers via courses and professional certifications they develop together.

"As cybersecurity problems have become prominent in almost all industries, learning skills related to cybersecurity has become indispensable for IT talent," said Qin Jiangyan, operations director of cybersecurity talent development at 360.

"With the cooperation of Tarena, a company that has one of the country's largest IT student enrollments and a complete IT curriculum system, we look forward to helping domestic companies build their own safe and open security systems from the bottom up," she said.

However, Xiong from 21st Century Education Research Institute pointed out that encouraging listed companies and leading enterprises to develop vocational education doesn't mean that they can leverage their economic power to reap excessive profits.

"Developing vocational education requires a large amount of investment, including nurturing teaching teams with new technologies, so government authorities should formulate additional policies, including tax incentives, for such enterprises," he said.

Lyu said that while vocational education is a great opportunity for education companies in the K-12 education sector to transform themselves, they still face many practical bottlenecks.

"It is not easy to build up resources in the vocational education sector. It will take at least three to five years for China to produce a group of leading companies in the vocational education market," he added.