Changes in Application-Oriented Talent in New-Quality Productive Forces: How Can Enterprises Grasp Talent Trends?

Looking back at 2024, China’s economy demonstrated remarkable resilience amid global economic growth. Looking ahead to 2025, the Chinese government has introduced a series of policies to stabilize growth, which will undoubtedly inject stronger momentum into market prosperity and the real economy.

Against this backdrop, technological innovation, artificial intelligence, and digital transformation are advancing at unprecedented speed. Meanwhile, the scarcity of talent and surging demand have become major challenges that must be faced.

1. Talent Competitiveness Reshapes the Future of Enterprises

Facing a rapidly changing business environment, enterprises are accelerating digital transformation with a strong sense of urgency. According to surveys, 29% of respondents expect companies to vigorously recruit digital transformation and AI-related talent in order to strengthen technical support and innovation capacity. At the same time, amid slowing sales growth, enterprises are actively hiring marketing and sales expansion talent to strengthen sales teams and drive steady business growth.

The rapid development of high-tech fields such as artificial intelligence has made cross-disciplinary technological integration and innovation a key driver of industry transformation and upgrading.

In terms of technological R&D and innovation talent allocation, industries are actively responding to the trend of competitiveness shifting from purely technological fields toward cross-disciplinary penetration, significantly increasing recruitment efforts. Among IT and technology respondents, 57% expect their companies to actively recruit R&D talent in 2025, closely followed by intelligent manufacturing and R&D fields at 56%.

2. New Challenges in the Job Market

In the digital era, corporate finance teams are facing new challenges. Surveys show that 66% of CFOs feel the greatest pressure comes from the need to reshape talent capabilities.

Following closely are issues of insufficient business understanding (50.5%) and inadequate predictive capabilities of finance for business and management (45.69%).

In addition, outdated financial operation models, weak digital foundations, and insufficient levels of financial intelligence are also common problems.

Although current market growth is slowing and the labor market may appear oversupplied, the field of talent recruitment still faces severe challenges.

30% of respondents stated that high employee turnover rates create ongoing replacement demands, which add to the burden of HR departments and affect enterprise operational efficiency. Another 30% pointed out difficulties such as lengthy recruitment cycles for critical positions and talent shortages—particularly in emerging technology fields and highly specialized roles—thus restricting enterprise innovation and development.

3. Changing Trends of Application-Oriented Talent in New-Quality Productive Forces

The competency structure of application-oriented talent in new-quality productive forces is composed of six core competency factors: business efficiency driving, acceptance of new-quality technologies, innovative learning and progress, integration of diverse technologies, interpersonal communication and influence, and core value leadership.

The skill level of the workforce is a key determinant of labor productivity. Therefore, changes in the skill structure of the manufacturing workforce can reflect changes in the relative scale of application-oriented talent in new-quality productive forces.

In the past decade, the proportion of high-skilled labor has steadily increased, while the share of low-skilled labor has significantly declined. By 2022, the proportion of manufacturing workers with a junior high school education or below fell to 61.8%, those with high school or vocational college education rose to 30.6%, and those with a bachelor’s degree or above rose to 7.6%. This demonstrates that the proportion of high-skilled application-oriented talent in the manufacturing sector has been steadily increasing over the past decade.