Demand escalates for tour guides with foreign-language skills

Looking for recruits

With the boom in the inbound tourism market, travel companies are seeking to hire more foreign-language graduates and talented young people.

The number of jobs in the tourism and leisure industries has increased continuously from the second quarter of 2023 after the nation loosened travel policies earlier that year, the latest figures from recruitment platform Zhaopin show.

Jobs in the sector surged 96.3 percent year-on-year in the second quarter, 53.6 percent in the third quarter, and 83.4 percent in the final quarter.

The market's recruitment needs for tourism talent increased 32.1 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of this year, according to Zhaopin.

"We have been recruiting tour guides who speak fluent Russian for quite a long time. We now have about 15 full-time Russian-language guides and hire temporary workers over the summer, usually college students for part-time jobs," said Li Yao, general manager of Heihe Youth Travel Services Co in northeastern Heilongjiang province.

The company mainly operates cross-border tourism services between China and Russia.

He said it's not easy to pass the exam and get a national permit to operate as a tour guide. The pay of tour guides is also dependent on the economic situation of the province a tour guide works in, Li added.