context: The 15th 5-year plan elevates the framing from 'employment promotion' to 'employment priority strategy', reflecting a shift toward treating high-quality employment as a primary goal of economic and social development rather than a downstream output. The State Council's '15th 5-year plan on implementing employment-first strategy', sets out goals, priority tasks and policy measures for promoting high-quality and full employment through 2030. The plan identifies the primary contradiction in the employment sector as a mismatch between labour supply and demand, and calls for integrating investment in people with investment in physical assets.
The plan sets several quantitative indicators
- urban survey unemployment rate remain below an annual average of 5.5 percent, continuing the 14th 5-year plan target
- the share of skilled workers among all employed persons to rise from 30 percent in 2025 to 35 percent in 2030
- three new social insurance coverage targets
- unemployment insurance enrolment to grow from 249 million to 255 million
- work injury insurance enrolment from 305 million to 345 million
- basic medical insurance enrolment to be maintained at around 95 percent
- urban employment as a share of total employment to rise from 65.6 percent to 68 percent
- labour productivity growth to exceed GDP growth
- average years of education among the working-age population to rise from 11.3 to 11.7 years
- basic pension insurance enrolment to remain at 95 percent or above
- the previous plan's specific numerical target for total new urban jobs has been dropped, replaced with a commitment to maintain a substantial scale with annual targets set as circumstances warrant
A requirement to establish an employment impact assessment mechanism for major policies and investment projects is a significant new signal, argued Ouyang Jun 欧阳俊 Southwestern University of Finance and Economics institute of economics and management professor. Requiring employment to be a prerequisite evaluation factor before policies and projects are approved concretises the employment priority orientation of macroeconomic policy, though it may also create tension with other policy objectives and require more comprehensive trade-off assessments, Ouyang noted. The plan's explicit call to stabilise state-owned enterprise recruitment and give state enterprises a leading role in job creation is also notable, as previous plans more typically emphasised the role of private enterprises and small and medium-sized enterprises, Ouyang added.
On specific sectors, the plan calls for stabilising employment in traditional manufacturing including light industry and textiles, supporting foreign trade firms to expand into new markets, developing intelligent and green construction and unlocking employment potential in transport, water conservancy and new energy infrastructure projects. Service sector employment, particularly in eldercare, childcare, tourism, catering and technology services, is to be actively promoted.
Graduate employability will become an explicit factor in allocating educational resources, assessing teaching quality and setting enrolment plans. The plan dedicates separate chapters to three groups: university graduates and other young workers, rural migrant workers and demobilised military personnel, and gig workers. On the latter group, the plan calls for platforms to regulate algorithmic management, improve transparency and protect workers' right to know, participate in and choose algorithmic rules.
Adapting to AI development to promote employment and entrepreneurship is elevated from a risk-response topic to a core macroeconomic task. The plan calls for cultivating new AI-related occupations, promoting human-machine collaboration in traditional sectors, prioritising AI deployment in labour-scarce and high-risk roles and launching a worker transition and redeployment support program. A dedicated AI employment impact survey system is to be established, with ongoing monitoring of AI application penetration, job creation and displacement and skills demand shifts.