Digital economy spawns new professions in China

About two decades ago, Wang Wei, a fresh university graduate back then, joined a manufacturing company in the city of Zhuhai in south China's Guangdong Province, specializing in circuit board welding.

Wang moved to Bejing in 2010 after his marriage, to be nearer to his home town in north China's Hebei Province. He found a welding job in a drone company.

In 2019, as more and more Internet companies and car manufacturers, as well as a large number of startups, invested in the research and development and testing of autonomous vehicles, Wang jumped ship to the operation center of Pony.ai, an autonomous driving service provider, tasked with the assembly, monitoring, operation and maintenance of the devices installed on intelligent connected vehicles.

China's digital industry has seen robust growth in recent years as it embarks on a tech-driven development path, generating new professions that not only help expand employment but also contribute to high-quality development in emerging sectors, such as artificial intelligence (AI).

At the end of July, 19 new professions, including Wang's position -- smart-vehicle maintenance worker, were added to China's list of officially recognized occupations. Over half of the new professions involve digital and smart technologies, such as operating staff of generative AI systems, smart vehicle testers and industrial internet maintenance staff, according to the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.

China has unveiled a set of guidelines recently to promote employment, vowing measures to expand new employment spaces in the digital economy.

Data shows that the added value of the core industries of the digital economy contributed to 10 percent of China's GDP in 2023.

With the wide application of AI technology, Zhong Jinyu, who was previously engaged in customer services, opted for a new position -- a generative AI system operator -- in his company. The company, NeuroBot, is an industrial AI vision platform provider, offering defect detection, size measurement, target positioning and other industrial vision functions based on deep learning technology.

Now, Zhong's job is to feed the company's large model with data collected from the company and customers, train it repeatedly and then feed the AI-generated content back to the customers.

"The new profession requires us to enhance the ability to learn new technologies quickly to remain competitive in the intelligent society of the future," Zhong said.

A survey by the online recruitment platform Lagou shows that the AI sector ranks among the top three job creators and recipients for Chinese university graduates this year.

Li Qiang, executive vice president of online job-seeking platform Zhaopin, said that the emergence of new professions represents the development direction of new technologies and new industries, requiring practitioners to have continuous learning and innovation ability.

The constant upgrading of China's digital industry has brought Wang Wei more room for his personal career development. He said that his next "small goal" is to strive to become a smart vehicle tester, a position that requires a higher level of software skills in his company.

"New problems may come at any time, and I can learn a lot in my work," said Wang.