York Profiles & Mentors

Yue Z.

Member of Technical Staff
Happy to mentor
Happy to be contacted
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About me

Yue Z.
Computer Science
Computing
Undergraduate
2010
China

My employment

Member of Technical Staff
Oracle
China
Digital and IT services
2013

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A day in the life of a Member of Technical Staff in China

How studying in the UK affected my job seeking

How I searched for jobs:
I worked for two companies after I graduated from York. As an MSc student I left the university at the end of September 2010 (the graduation ceremony was at January 2011) and after I came back to my home country I began to hunt for a job. My first company is Gohigh Technology, Datang Group. I worked for that company for over two years and in Apr 2013, I moved to Oracle where I have worked since.

There are many websites in China for Job hunters, such as ZhiLianZhaoPin, 51Job and ZhonghuaYingCai, there is also the famous LinkedIn. However, those websites are mainly for people with working experience. For the people who just graduated or have not graduated yet, this website called YingJieSheng is more suitable. Besides, many opportunities are also published on bbs of some universities, such as Tsinghua and BUPT.

Is it easy to get a job? Well, it depends, depending upon the year you graduate and the major you are studying, the situations are different. From my experience, UK graduates may not be easy to get a satisfactory job, compared to Chinese native gradates (especially the 211 Project Universities) and US graduates. For those native Masters graduates, they normally graduate with 2 years internship experience, which is almost equal to two years working experience in China. Working experience for us? Almost none. For US graduates, they normally stay abroad for more than two years, about us, just one year. That is why compared to them, we are not so competitive on the job hunting just when we graduate. But usually, we can show our advantage after 1 or 2 years of working, we have more solid knowledge and we have an international view, which will bring us many benefits in our daily working.

Attitudes to study in the UK:
Compared to native (China) graduates and US graduates, we (UK educated) are not so competitive when we just graduated. For some employers, they may not familiar with UK universities, maybe the only a few UK universities they are familiar with are Oxford, Cambridge and Empire College. But you don’t need to be worry about that during the interview. If you got the chance to take the written exam, this means your CV is already qualified for their company.

Challenges in looking for jobs:
The experience in York certainly brings us many, many benefits, but being away from our home country will also have some impact on the job hunting. First, native masters students will have many chances to take an internship, which is almost the same as full time working. They spent the time at a company when they are supposed to be at the university. This is actually one of the problems that China education is currently facing. Masters degrees in China now means a degree paper with two years work experience. What a master student should learn is somehow ignored. From many employers' point of view, the native graduates are already skilled worker which can make their value on their first working day. They are reluctant to pay the training costs. Besides, native students normally start their job hunting process a year before they graduate, but for us, we need to start it after we leave our university, and this can cause some anxiety.

The recruitment process

The recruitment processes are almost the same or similar between different employers. We need to pass the written exam and the interview, for most companies there will be several rounds of interview, such as technical interview, HR interview and manager interview.

Where I hope to be in 5 years

Become an expert. Besides that, I would like to increase my salary and get promoted :)

My advice to students considering work

I have three pieces of advice. One, make yourself better. Employers are hiring you, not hiring your university or hiring the UK, if you have better skills then it will certainly make it easier to get a job. Two, start early. You'd better to pay some attention to the job market in China before you leave York. Three, our Career Service at York is excellent, you can go to there for help about your CV - and your CV will be significantly improved.

What I do

As a software engineer, my duties with my first company included developing products, performance tuning and code refracting, and training new employees in the second year. At Oracle my working area lies upon High Availability of Oracle Fusion Middleware, which includes system testing and testing automation.

Skills I use and how I developed them



Extracurricular skills:
The ability to learn new things is always the most important, professional skills are also the most basic. For a software engineer, programming ability, coding quality and working efficiency is very important. Communication ability is also required.

What I like most

At Oracle employees are totally respected and the working environment is very great. We feel comfortable and we can dedicate our value to this company. Besides, we could learn a lot and we don't need to work under so much pressure. The working hours are also very reasonable, unlike many Chinese native IT companies with super-long working hours.

What I like least

I haven't noticed anything over the past year. The only thing I can imagine is that the lunch is not delicious but very expensive.

Next steps...

If you like the look of Yue’s profile, the next steps are down to you! You can send Yue a message to find out more about their career journey.

Contact Yue

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