Chinese electric car factories can’t hire fast enough

Xing Wei graduated from a vocational high school in northeastern China in 2003 and went to work as an electrician at an auto parts factory in the south of the country. The only set of wheels he could afford was a black three-speed bicycle.

He earned $1,150 a year and shared a sweltering dormitory with three other workers. “There was air conditioning, but because we had to pay for the electricity ourselves, we basically didn’t turn it on,” Mr Xing said.

Twenty years later, Mr. Xing, 42, earns almost $60,000 a year. He works as a senior electrician installing industrial robots in electric car factories for Nio, a Chinese car manufacturer. Last winter he bought a $52,000 Nio ES6 SUV.

The Chinese electric vehicle market is the largest and fastest growing in the world. A frenzy of factory construction and expansion has made electricians and robotics specialists a hot commodity.

“If you want to recruit people with relevant experience, there are relatively few people in this industry,” Mr Xing said.

More than 1.5 million people now work at dozens of electric car companies in China and their suppliers. The largest of these, BYD, has 570,000 employees, compared with 610,000 globally for Detroit’s Big Three combined.

As parts of China’s economy slow, Beijing must shift workers to sectors that are still growing rapidly, especially electric vehicle production. But Beijing faces a shortage of vocational training and a surplus of young people with university degrees who are not interested in factory work.

Most in demand are skilled technicians and engineers like Mr. Assembly line workers in car factories earn less than half his salary.

Beijing estimated in 2021 that the country had more than twice as many skilled technician jobs as the actual number of qualified workers.

A Shanghai government report last year found that the highest-paid 10 percent of senior factory technicians earned at least $51,000 a year. Workers with these skills change jobs regularly: Before moving to Hefei in central China to work for Nio two years ago, Mr.

Fueled by loans from state banks and help from municipalities, Chinese automakers are building electric car factories faster than sales are rising, leading to a price war that has left most companies losing money. This has caused a shock in the sector. Nio, for example, announced in November that it would lay off 10 percent of its employees. None of the cuts were in production, Nio said.

“We are already very concerned about the shortage of hands,” said Ji Huaqiang, Nio’s vice president of manufacturing.

The seeds of the labor shortage were planted years ago when the Chinese government’s economic planners failed to see the scale of the electric car boom and failed to train enough workers for it.

In 2016, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology predicted that the electric car industry would need 1.2 million workers by 2025, warning that China then had only 170,000 people with the necessary skills.

It is fair to say that more than two-fifths of the country’s eleven million graduates study subjects related to science and engineering each year. That’s double the share in the United States, where there is also a shortage of welders, electricians and other industrial workers.

But many of these graduates aspire to work in white-collar jobs at Internet companies and government, not factories.

For decades, factories in China could rely on a steady stream of farmers’ sons and daughters arriving in the cities and taking almost any job, no matter how boring.

One of them was Mr. As a teenager, he was determined to leave his hometown of Hongshi, near China’s border with North Korea. He went to a vocational high school, where his teacher told him to look for work in southeastern China, near Hong Kong. As soon as he graduated from high school, he packed his bags.

In Guangzhou, he found a job at a factory that stamped body parts for a nearby Honda assembly plant. When new equipment arrived, foreign experts connected it to laptops and made all the decisions during test runs. Mr.

“I could only look at them like a doll,” he said.

It left a mark on him. He lived on free meals at the factory cafeteria and saved his wages, $100 a month, to buy a $1,195 IBM laptop. He studied automation on weekends through an adult education program.

The training would help him build a career in the electric vehicle sector. In 2019, he had bought an apartment of almost 1,100 square meters in a suburb of Ningbo, 1,300 kilometers from Guangzhou. Today, his parents live in the apartment, while Mr.

The Chinese government has tried to train a generation of workers like Mr. Xing, with mixed results.

In 2014, Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, urged government and Communist Party officials, as well as companies, to “cultivate hundreds of millions of high-quality workers and technical and skilled personnel.”

But that goal has collided with the rising ambitions of Chinese parents who have shown less interest in sending their children to vocational high schools to learn the skills of an electrician, a machinist or other technician.

The number of teens attending vocational and technical high schools fell 25 percent between 2010 and 2021, the year with the most recent data. At the same time, the number of students in academic secondary schools hardly changed.

“Factory jobs are often associated with the ‘three D’s’: dirty, dangerous and demeaning,” said Minhua Ling, an associate professor specializing in China’s vocational education system at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Younger Chinese “find it demeaning,” she said. “The feeling that you are a machine has no meaning to them.”

About 60 percent of China’s population when it turns 18 enrolls in college. In 2000 this was still 10 percent.

Companies in China have been slower than those in some countries, such as Germany, in establishing long-term learning programs to develop future leaders on the factory floor.

“Demand increased so quickly that the education system was flat-footed, and it takes a few years to adequately prepare and train top technicians,” said Gerard A. Postiglione, professor emeritus of higher education research at the University of Hong Kong.

An increasingly steep decline in birth rates makes the challenge even more urgent.

The number of young people turning 18 every year in China has fallen by more than 40 percent since the mid-1980s. Based on the number of babies born in recent years, the number of 18-year-olds will halve in the coming years.

China, and especially the electric car industry, is trying to use automation to address the shortage of willing hands.

According to the International Federation of Robotics, companies in China will have installed more industrial robots by 2022 than the rest of the world combined. It surpassed its biggest industrial rivals, Japan, the United States, South Korea and Germany.

By 2027, Nio plans to replace half of its management positions with artificial intelligence and a third of its factory workers with robots, said Mr. Ji, the company’s vice president of manufacturing. One of Nio’s factories makes 300,000 EV motors per year and has just 30 employees.

“All these companies are struggling to find workers,” said Zhou Linlin, CEO of Principle Capital, a Shanghai-based investment firm with stakes in numerous Chinese factories. “That’s why all companies are looking for automation and robotics solutions.”

But robots can only offset part of China’s growing demand for factory technicians.

Volkswagen is hiring for a new research center near Nio, in Hefei, which will staff 3,000 engineers to develop electric cars, and is preparing to build electric cars there.

That means even more demand for specialists like Mr. Xing, who is already struggling to fill his own team of electricians. “We are also constantly recruiting,” he said, “and we are unable to recruit suitable, relevant staff.”

Li You And Joy Dong research contributed.