Growing Ningbo luring world-class talent

Posted by freemexy on February 27th, 2019

In 2005, 29-year-old Wang Hong was a third year graduate student at Fujian Medical University in Fuzhou, southern China’s Fujian Province. The chances of working at a local hospital after graduation were high, but she was also seeking opportunities elsewhere.To get more Ningbo City news, you can visit shine news official website.

Then she saw an advertisement about the High-level Talent Intelligence Introduction Conference in Ningbo. It promised to cover the travel costs of graduates coming from other places. So she gave it a try. The train from Fuzhou to Ningbo took about 10 hours. But the result came much earlier than expected. In less than two weeks, she received an offer from Ningbo Women and Children’s Hospital. “Their efficiency was really impressive,” said Wang, who is now vice head of the children’s gastroenterology department at the hospital. “I only found out later that the person who interviewed me at the fair was the president of the hospital.”

The conference, initiated in 1999, has attracted over 60,000 people like Wang to work and stay in Ningbo over the past 20 years. And in 2006 it became part of the Ningbo Talent, Science and Technology Week. This year, the talent week includes 16 major events targeting overseas returnees, academics, entrepreneurs and other high-end professionals in specialized technological areas. Over 3,000 local companies and institutions are offering more than 13,000 job opportunities over the week, which ends today. It is expected to attract more than 20,000 visitors.

In the Yangtze River Delta City Cluster Plan approved by the State Council in 2016, Ningbo is listed as an independent metropolitan area, “a world-class port and a hub of international shipping and logistics services,” together with four other regional centers including Nanjing, Hangzhou, Hefei and Suzhou-Wuxi-Changzhou. The competition for talent has been fierce so far. Since December last year, the Ningbo government has announced two measures under the “3315 plan” to extend the scope of individuals and teams who can enjoy preferential policies from the plan.According to these measures, a start-up team which meets certain criteria and promises to stay in Ningbo for at least 10 years can be funded with millions of yuan.

If the project is special enough, there is no funding limit. “Ningbo has a large manufacturing output, larger than Hangzhou,” said Jin Yan, vice head of the Organization Department of the Ningbo Committee of the Communist Party of China. “The area that we are weaker in is the service industry. So this time nine new areas have been added to the plan, which include e-commerce, shipping and logistics, finance and insurance, technology services and modern farming, amongst others,” added Jin. The “3315 plan” is first launched by the Ningbo government back in 2011. By the end of 2017, it had supported the establishment of 296 setups in Ningbo, bringing a total sales of 5.4 billion yuan and 860 million yuan (US5 million) of profit and tax revenue in 2017 alone — up 44 percent and 46 percent from a year earlier.