Village official post seen as job fallback

About 60 percent of village officials in Henan Province said that they opted to take up their posts this summer to ensure they had a place in the job market this year, which has become increasingly competitive, according to a recent survey.

Carried out at Zhengzhou University of Light Industry, the survey that targeted some 200 graduate students and village officials in the central Chinese province said that 58.1 percent of respondents that have chosen the work were driven by the "not so bad" salaries, given that they could not find other jobs and wanted to relieve themselves from the pressures of being unemployed.

In terms of preference, however, only 40 percent of respondents said that they were actually genuinely interested in gaining experience as a village official, while the majority 60 percent admitted that they were not keen on the job.

Forty-three percent of those who did not want to be a village official said that the reason for their dissent was that the work has little or no connection to what they studied at school, while 37 percent said that they know nothing about the rural areas and winning support from local villagers.

This year has been recognized as the most difficult to find a job due to the some 7 million graduate students who entered the workforce.