One naturally-endowed privilege of senior employees is that they will, from time to time, be asked by the human resources department to help interview job applicants.

That is an opportunity to keep in touch with China's younger generation, beyond the few young people who have already fitted into the office system. It even provides a window into some of society's problems.

I was recently asked by a Beijing-based national organization to interview applicants for positions requiring a high level of English proficiency.

I was happy to discover remarkable progress in the applicants' language abilities, and indeed those of all young people who have had college education in Chinese cities, compared with the applicants I saw in the 1980s, 90s.

In the 90s, when a company advertised for a position requiring speaking and writing in English, no matter how many people were fighting for the job, you would not expect a happy outcome unless you could land a few applications from a few foreign languageinstitutes.

But now, if the salary is attractive or the employer has an outstanding reputation (as was the case in which I was recently involved), for one opening you can easily get 100 applications from recent graduates from universities in the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand.

This is good news for the human resource managers. They will no longer have to allocate as much effort on training staff. In the best-case scenario, some of the new recruits can start work immediately.

But nothing comes without a cost. On the one hand, there is the human cost. Graduates from domestic foreign languages institutes are losing out - along with those from various university foreign language departments.

In most cases, they are at a disadvantage because they are trained in a more textbook-oriented, protected environment with little international exposure. Even worse, their training in some skills, such as practical writing, has been on a steady decline. Most of their teachers have little or no experience in any non-teaching jobs involving writing.

On the other hand, there is the financial cost. So much money has been spent by Chinese parents on their children's education abroad.

With the economy becoming increasingly open, one can only expect to see an even stronger commitment from middle-class parents to finance their children's expensive overseas education.

Indeed, domestic schools cannot easily compete with foreign schools. Besides a much larger choice in academic pursuits, Chinese youngsters can gain extensive practical knowledge in their daily engagement with the local society. These encounters broaden the horizon of their futures.

However, if this is going to be the trend - which I think is highly likely - it will pose an ultimate challenge. Employers - wherever they are from - cannot expect to pay their internationally educated staff with typical Chinese wages, meaning the meager wages in Chinese factories in the 90s.

All employers in international sectors have to be prepared to raise salary levels steadily in order to retain the best employees from the more competitive job market.

Eventually, internationally competitive salaries will be paid to international quality employees. In the process, a company's internal wage discrepancy will have to widen and younger employees will have to be given the chance to move up the career ladder more quickly.

E-mail: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/21/2007 page4)