Graduates' employability in the creative industry in China: what competencies, qualities, and skills Chinese graduates with an undergraduate degree in Fine Art need for employment in China
He, Yayi (2022) Graduates' employability in the creative industry in China: what competencies, qualities, and skills Chinese graduates with an undergraduate degree in Fine Art need for employment in China. PhD thesis, University for the Creative Arts.
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With the evolving effect of globalisation, the employment challenges of Chinese graduates has become highly complex and increasingly uncertain. China has witnessed a rapid expansion in its higher education sector in recent decades, with a concomitant increase in the number of graduates. This has severely affected the availability of relevant jobs, to the extent that we are witnessing a saturation of the graduate job market. In addition, various industrial restructuring and repositioning of productivity has created further challenges in the job market.
This emerging imbalance between job availability and graduates has become a matter of concern, not only for the those seeking professional employment, but for employers, government and universities. This research addresses the specific concerns regarding the employment of Fine Art graduates in China. Statistics indicate that, across all higher education disciplines, the employment rate for Fine Art graduates, six months after graduation, has severely declined for four consecutive years. This implies that existing pedagogical approaches and education policies in China have not successfully projected or responded to the changing job market and have not positively impacted the employment levels of Fine Art graduates.
The Fine Art curriculum in China is based on a relatively traditional approach to the discipline and is mostly dedicated to the development of skills in painting, drawing sculpting and printmaking. In contrast, the cultural industries, in which Fine Art is supposedly situated, are undergoing a process of development towards an approach more in line with the globalised creative industries. It is this situation that presents, not only an urgent, ongoing problem regarding the sustainability of Fine Art education in China, but also the central research problem of this thesis. The research addresses this problem through an analysis that uses a coordination triangle model in combination with a heuristic model of employability, with the aim of identifying the competencies, qualities and skills Chinese graduates, with an undergraduate degree in Fine Art, need for employment in the emerging creative industries in China.
The research argues that the current traditional skills based approach to Fine Art education in China does not meet the needs of students in terms of their professional job prospects in the context of the fast developing, globalised creative industries. Furthermore, the researcher makes recommendations, based on a thorough analysis of original, current, primary data, for Fine Art higher education programmes towards curriculum development and delivery, that meets the expectations of graduates and employers of the creative industries of China.
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