Government job competition still high

The Beijing civil service examination held on Saturday remained highly competitive with approximately 13 people competing for each available position. Education experts said that this year's test was more focused on applicants' capacity for solving practical problems compared to previous ones.

A total of 53,609 people applied for 4,169 available positions in all levels of the Beijing municipal government, with 3,405 of these positions being community and township level ones.

Applying for city, district and county-level positions, applicants are required to have at least two years of work experience. Still, fresh college graduates accounted for about half of the applicants.

This year however, because Beijing announced on January 6 that the examination would be held nearly two months earlier than usual, there was little time for applicants to prepare.

"I only prepared for the examination for a week," Tang Tianyi, a female graduate from the Communication University of China, told the Global Times Sunday. As she studied journalism, she applied for a publicity position in Beitaipingzhuang, a community in Haidian district.

"Competition for these positions is not particularly high, as many give up," Tang said, "In my room with 30 seats, about six people did not participate in the examination."

Liu Liang, an IT company employee for two years, said he was too busy to prepare for the examination in such a short period of time, the Beijing News reported Sunday. "It was really a bit perplexing" he said.

Experts from the Beijing-based Huatu Education organization said the altered agenda disturbed some applicants' preparation plan, and when some feel they do not perform well in the morning portion of the test, they do not participate in the afternoon one.

Experts, posting on education website offcn.com, said that examination topics are heavily related to current events, as well as economic, environmental, scientific and technological resource subjects.

Some believe that the examination incorporates each subject to not only test candidates' attention to important events, but also their ability to analyze and understand them.

Wang Ziyang from Huatu Education said that compared to the 2011 examination, the difficulty of the examination was reduced this year on subjects such as complex mathematics, a trend for the national civil service exam that Beijing is following.