A survey conducted by chinahr.com, a leading Chinese recruitment website, shows over 90 percent of white collars felt anxiety and depression as the past year came to an end and a new year took off, with half of them planning to change jobs, according to Monday's Beijing Morning Post.

The undated photo above shows a white-collar employee taking a rest after a hard day's work. [Nanfang Metropolitan News]

The results came from a poll of more than 1500 white-collar employees with government departments and companies in 15 industries, such as IT, finance, and manufacturing.

"Having lived a busy, humdrum and vain life for another year" was the reason cited most for their year-end blues, accounting for 28.4 percent of the respondents, followed by "falling short of set targets," cited by 26.7 percent. Just over 17 percent said they felt low because their work didn't go smoothly, while 14.5 percent were simply worried about getting old.

Lu, a programmer with a telecom equipment company, complained that he had been working for a daily average of ten hours in the past year, but found nothing recommendable in his annual performance report, not to mention a promising career. The lack of a sense of achievement has left him with enormous depression as well as frustration, especially after learning that some of his college classmates have started their own enterprises while his former colleague was promoted in a new company.

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Many shared Lu's frustrations, some of whom sought to make a change through finding another job. Among them is Miss Sun, a sales manager with a cosmetic company. She had filed several letters applying for a job, and didn't miss any large job fairs over the past two months.

The reason, as Sun put it, is that she found it hard to make a breakthrough in her current company, and there is little room for a raise or promotion.

Peng Dongling, a career consultant with chinahr.com, said the "year-end job-hop" is a concentrated expression of the year-end syndrome, a manifestation of mood incurred by the employment psychological cycle.

A report by a Beijing-based career consulting agency shows 49 percent of white collars planned to change jobs at the year-end, and 17 percent believed they could land a new one.

Peng attributes the white collars' vulnerability to the syndrome to their overly-high expectations of themselves.

For example, she said, as many 45.6 percent of the respondents target "a satisfactory raise," 21.3 percent of them set their eyes on "improved performances," and 14.8 percent hoped for a promotion. As to the fulfillment of the set targets, only 6.5 percent were "very satisfied," while 26.7 were "rather unsatisfied."

"With the figures, it is not uneasy to understand their depression and self contempt," Peng was quoted as saying.

She suggests the white collars have a clear understanding of their own strengths and weaknesses before drawing a blueprint for their careers. She also warns against changing jobs without a clear career plan.