Chongqing- China's economy is transitioning from being led by investment and manufacturing to being driven by consumption, services, and innovation, and talents are key in the process.

As the economy changes, China's next challenge is transforming education and skills development to deliver the talent needed for an innovative, digitized, postindustrial economy.

iChongqing reporters, together with Aj from PTE, a British Youtuber who discusses geopolitics, politics, entertainment, and issues around the world, discussed China's Next Move, illustrating how the university and vocational education can promote employment and entrepreneurship, help economic and social development, improve people's well-being and maintain strong resilience in the long-term development of China.

Vocational education has played an irreplaceable and important role in economic and social development and personal growth. As of August this year, there were 11,200 vocational colleges in China with 29.15 million students.

Take Chongqing as an example; as a crucial city in manufacturing, Chongqing saw an increasing demand for the manufacturing sector's employment, with 1.15 million people last year.

Over the past three years, over 600 new majors have been added to Chongqing's vocational colleges, including cloud computing, industrial robots, and modern service industries. Those colleges have established close cooperative relationships with thousands of companies. The scale of vocational education in Chongqing is expanding, the structure is being optimized, and the quality is improving.

More importantly, vocational education in China embraces the world with an image of openness, tolerance, progress, and vitality. According to Xinhua, the country has established stable ties with more than 70 countries and international organizations in vocational education and found 20 Luban workshops in 19 overseas countries.

Luban workshop is a project launched by the Tianjin government, designed to provide state-of-the-art technical and vocational training, promote modern vocational education reforms, enhance collaboration among vocational schools worldwide, and thus better serve the purpose of the Belt and Road Initiative. The project is named after Lu Ban, the father of Chinese architecture from around the 4th century B.C.