Unfavorable market situations – can changing jobs be an unwise decision?
When practitioners of the financial industry discussed the exit of the UK from the EU and the influence it may have on the financial industry, stock prices plummeted. In recent years, China’s foreign financial institutions showed market weakness due to not only the retrenchment strategy of local regulators, but also the impact of external factors by the global market. Through business development of some institutions in china as the global economy produced a big effect on the business expanding for china’s local branch. Besides, the staff’s freeze or even reduction in the main foreign banks, employee’s confidence plunge and brain drain in this industry.
In the first half of the year, foreign banks seemed to be more cautious on recruitment. The small amount of new positions left may be a problem, but alternative positions’ that reopen should be checked and evaluated by Asian regional head office layer by layer. What’s more, some posts may even change from a senior role to an intermediate position or an outsourcing contract – an increasingly popular mode at present. From the perspective of practitioners, our customers also revealed that “frequency for receiving recruiter’ phone is greatly reduced” or “More cases are that being offered with some opportunities outside their industry of expertise”.
Therefore, under the present market situation, is the choice of a conservative point of view an ideal way? The answer is not certain. First of all, from the angle of market, a global crisis doesn’t mean all financial institutions lose confidence towards China or even Asian markets. For instance, though standard chartered Bank (SCB) began its mass layoffs in the globally since last year with some alteration on organizational structure in china, in fact, SCB focused much on Asian market as there are more than 100 job vacancies or even new positions’ opened in branches in Singapore, Hong Kong and China. Besides this, the Swiss Bank Corporation set up new branches in Shanghai and remains optimistic towards the Shanghai wealth management service market, and thus it shows a healthy development in China. At last some medium or small-sized commercial banks which have a stable business in China would also have some corresponding demand for consolidating their business in China as well as creating some mid- and senior level positions.
From the perspective of practitioners, salary increase when switching jobs on the market is not as optimistic as a booming market. If employees were given opportunities for career advancement or new learning opportunities, keeping an open mind/attitude to take the chance would not be such a bad thing.
