As the catering industry continues to lead the consumption recovery, it has highlighted the contradiction of "difficulties for enterprises in recruiting and for graduates in finding employment." This stems from a structural disconnect between the service industry's scaling, standardization, and digital upgrades and the traditional talent cultivation model. While the industry accelerates, talent supply lags behind; resolving this dilemma is crucial for the high-quality development of the service sector. Pan Wei, Vice President of the China General Chamber of Commerce, pointed out that the core of service consumption is the experience, the quality of which directly depends on the skills and caliber of practitioners. For the catering industry to achieve a qualitative leap, a highly skilled, professional, and innovative technical talent team is urgently needed.
The transition from "school-enterprise cooperation" to an "industry-education integration community" represents a key path to addressing the structural challenges in talent supply. On January 16, New Oriental Cuisine Education, under China East Edu (00667.HK), officially initiated the establishment of an "Industry-Education Integration Community" and simultaneously launched the "Thousand Enterprises, Ten Thousand Positions Talent Excellence Plan." This initiative marks not just an upgrade to school-enterprise cooperation but deeply integrates industry demands into the entire educational process, aiming to systematically cultivate high-quality skilled talents that meet the future needs of the industry and solidify the talent foundation for the service sector's sustainable development.
The core of this plan lies in breaking the "disconnect between supply and demand" inherent in traditional school-enterprise cooperation. Through deeply integrated models such as joint curriculum development, enterprise-order-based training, and dual-teacher instruction, it encourages enterprises to transform from mere "users of talent" into "cultivators of talent." This enables students to achieve a seamless transition where "enrollment equates to entry into a position, and graduation equates to employment." In this process, high-quality employment is no longer the end goal but a core objective woven throughout the entire cultivation journey.
At the event, Wu Wei, Chairman of the Board of China East Edu Group, elaborated on the group's support and commitment to this strategy. He stated, "To keep pace with the nation's high-quality development of vocational education and support the cultivation of high-caliber skilled talents for the industry, the group will continue to deepen industry-education integration. We will pool resources from government, enterprises, the industry, and other stakeholders to build a 'value community' integrating industry, education, research, and learning, helping more students achieve high-quality employment through their skills!"
The "Three-Dimensional Quality Model" drives high-quality employment by systematically defining what constitutes "quality employment" and, in turn, compelling comprehensive reform of the cultivation process. This model is precisely the key lever for solving the industry's development challenges. It directly addresses the shortcomings on the talent supply side: through deep cooperation with industry leaders like Holiland, Kerry Commercial Group, Lan Xiangzi, Fei Da Chu, and Xiao Cai Yuan, it introduces job skills, facilities, equipment, technical processes, and service standards directly into the campus. This ensures students possess professional capabilities and an innovative mindset even before graduation, significantly shortening their on-the-job adaptation period.
As the "Thousand Enterprises, Ten Thousand Positions" plan releases tens of thousands of high-quality job opportunities annually, this model provides invaluable "talent certainty" in an era of economic and employment uncertainty. It is not only a distillation of New Oriental Cuisine Education's 38 years of vocational education experience but also a vivid microcosm of China's vocational education evolving from scale expansion to connotative development and from one-sided output to ecosystem co-construction.
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