Young workers decide to go it alone

Greater tolerance

As employees' attitudes toward work change, along with increasingly diversified employment methods in different industries, new forms of flexible employment are emerging.

Workers want flexibility in where, when and how they are employed. Since 2019, there has been an 83 percent rise in the number of job posts mentioning "flexibility", according to LinkedIn's Global Talent Trends Report issued in January. On individual companies' LinkedIn profiles, references to "flexibility" in posts rose by 343 percent over the same period.

Yu Hai, a sociology professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, said, "Traditional forms of employment have diversified in these fast-changing times, while society is showing greater tolerance for newly emerging occupations."

According to latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics, by the end of last year, the number of workers in flexible employment in China reached 200 million — more than 1.6 million of them in livestreaming and other forms of new media, nearly a threefold year-on-year rise.

Rather than joining a company and leaving after several years, some college graduates choose a different course of action — including Lu Sina, 28, who works and lives in Hangzhou.

Lu launched a travel agency with a friend after graduating from Sichuan Conservatory of Music in 2016 with a major in culture industry management.

Short of social experience and long-range planning, Lu found running the small business too difficult and exhausting. After leaving the agency in 2018, she worked as a curatorial assistant in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province. She was also employed as a part-time butler at an inn in Moganshan, a scenic area in Zhejiang, and did a variety of other jobs.