Industry digest: China's approach to career development

Geely Galaxy is one of many Chinese product lines and new brands to have been launched recently

Some 101 new Chinese car brands were launched over the past year, despite pandemic-related delays

I recently spent a miserable hour on the phone trying to cancel a subscription before getting back to my day job and carrying out video interviews with Chinese candidates for a senior role in the Chinese arm of a European manufacturer.  

These two apparently unrelated events set me thinking. Two years on from Covid, the UK is still providing pandemic levels of customer service – and trotting out the same tired excuses about high call volumes – while in China they're up and running and performing as if the pandemic never happened. 

Speaking to these impressive multilingual candidates was a real eye-opener – both in terms of their ambition and positivity and the insights they shared about the Chinese automotive market. 

Did you know, for example, that the average Chinese consumer changes their vehicle around every 18 months? Or that – apart from among customers of Ferrari and Rolls-Royce – there's precious little brand loyalty?

Buying decisions are being driven by status, and the growth in the Chinese economy is leading to many customers upgrading from international volume-selling brands to either luxury foreign brands or local ones with very high levels of technology. 

Incredibly, one candidate revealed that 101 new Chinese car brands had been launched in just the last year. How did they manage that when the pandemic forced most of the Chinese production plants to close in 2020 and lockdowns continued until last December? How have they been able to develop new technologies? How did they grow sales volumes in 2022 while Europe was in decline?

I suggest that part of the reason lies in the Chinese work ethic – something that defined each of the candidates I spoke to during the China search assignment. To a person, they were utterly committed to their professional development and determined to succeed in their automotive careers.  

One of them described how his eagerness to work in the automotive industry led him to study for a three-year master’s degree in Germany because of the country’s manufacturing strengths. To do this, he first had to spend a year in China learning German from scratch to professional fluency level. He has worked for one of the big German OEMs ever since and now speaks fluent English as well – with a German accent. 

Another candidate told me he was working full time more than 1000 miles away from his young family but accepted the sacrifice without complaint. It’s a far cry from the UK, where the first question a job candidate often asks is: “How many days can I work from home?”

In China, the attitude among employees seems to be built around self-improvement to make a company want to hire or promote them, whereas in the UK the prevailing question is: “What is the company going to do for me?”

The normalisation of hybrid working post-pandemic has certainly fuelled this attitude at home, combined with skill shortages across the UK automotive sector that have put job candidates in the ascendancy. 

That is a big subject that requires strong, imaginative leadership to tackle, but getting out of the pandemic mindset (or using it as excuse to cut costs) is a good place to start. 

How refreshing it would be to ring a call centre and be answered by a human being within a minute or two. Life is too short to be 25th in a call queue.

*Lynda Ennis, founder of global automotive and mobility executive search company Ennis & Co*