Research On Current Employment Issues, Challenges And Solutions For Graduates With Medical Cosmetology In Higher Vocational Education

Cosmetology is an extremely fast growing market in China with promising potentials. As a result, the cosmetic industry is getting ever thirstier for practitioners with relevant professional skills. In the early days when beauty therapies first emerged in the market place, employees were mostly recruited with high school level qualifications and short term training. But as the industry matures, many businesses are growing into enterprise level and some are seeking to be publicly listed, thus requiring a much wider skill sets, especially for cosmetology experts with professional education. To meet such demands, there are close to50tertiary institutes nation wide that have developed curriculums of medical cosmetology major with an annual enrolment number of over4000students up until2011.However, even with such shortage in skilled professional supply, statistics showed that less than half of the medical cosmetology graduates have actually chose to be employed by the industry. To explain the reasons behind this conflict of demand and supply, this study set out to explore potential factors affecting the balance between the market requirement and students decision-makings, taking Shanghai University of Chinese Traditional Chinese Medicine as an example. This study include introduction to the subject and impetus of the research, with Chapter One focusing on graduates employment reality; Chapter Two performing surveys and interviews with the employing businesses and industry; Chapter Three analyzing data collected during the research process from institutional level, business level, social level and policy level; Chapter Four summarizing findings by comparing to literature reviews and making recommendations.The outcome and findings of this study draw the following conclusion:1. some of the graduates of medical cosmetology lack professional dedication, professional competency and professional enthusiasm;2. such problems of graduates are contributed by institutional, industrial, social and policy levels;3. to improve the current situation, institutions need better employment consultation and industrial training. Employers need to cooperate with institution to form closer relationships. Guide parental and social influences on students’ decision-makings. Government agencies need to update policies according to market and institutional requirements.In our country’s higher education popularization propulsion in the process, difficult to achieve one hundred percent of the employment of the higher vocational education to improve the higher request, the employment quality finally reflected in students’career development. In training students’ professional ability at the same time, but also pay attention to cultivating students’ general sex professional ability and quality, for their future career development animals.