The employment situation in the province of Shanxi in North China brightened in the first three quarters, according to the Shanxi Bureau of Statistics. 

During the nine-month period, Shanxi created 387,000 new jobs in its urban areas, completing 84.1 percent of the annual target, and helped 294,000 rural laborers find jobs outside their hometowns, completing 89.2 percent of that annual target.

Responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, from February Shanxi has enacted and carried out a series of measures to secure employment, according to an official at the Shanxi Department of Resource and Social Security.

Shanxi has encouraged institutions and companies to increase their recruitment, increased one-off employment subsidies for small and micro enterprises, improved its labor service matchmaking mechanism and supported the organized export of labor.

The province reduced or exempted 14.80 billion yuan ($2.23 billion) in corporate social security premiums payable by businesses by the end of September, in an initiative that is expected to benefit 114,000 companies and 3.8 million people throughout 2020.

Unemployment insurance of 1.69 billion yuan was paid to 1.82 million employees in 11,555 enterprises by the end of September, 7.15 times that for the same period last year. 

In terms of special groups, Shanxi has established a service guarantee mechanism to help 1.08 million migrant workers return to work and taken measures to secure employment for university graduates.

To improve people's vocational skills, the province has expanded a mass skills improvement project. It arranged for 35 platforms to carry out online training and had organized on-site training of 9,133 sessions for around 740,000 people by the end of September. 

In addition, it has continued to develop employment promotions and services, including launching online and offline job fairs.

The province has also encouraged entrepreneurship, in an effort to boost self-employment, by increasing individual and corporate loans for starting businesses and streamlining related applications and approval procedures.

Meanwhile, the coverage of unemployment insurance has been expanded to guarantee the basic livelihoods of the workforce. To date, unemployment subsidies of 28.98 million yuan have been paid out to 21,139 unemployed people in 2020.

In the wake of all these measures, the registered urban unemployment rate in Shanxi was only 3.1 percent at the end of September.