HEBI, China (ILO News) – Zhu Mingfu, Niu Zhiyong and Liu Dapeng, have been friends since childhood. They are among 14 million people in China who have benefited from the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) flagship entrepreneurship and management training programme (SIYB) since 2003.

Zhu graduated with a PhD from the University of California and majored in semi-conductors, while Liu is an automation PhD graduate from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Nui is a PhD graduate from Shanghai Telecommunication University, majoring in enterprise management.

After university, they explored the possibility of establishing a business together. The graduates, now in their early thirties, from the small Chinese city of Hebi had plenty of ideas but did not know how to put them into practice. They needed to learn more about how to cost products, maximize their technical skills and arrange finance for day-to-day business operations.

In 2014, they heard about the ILO Start and Improve Your Business (SIYB) training course and decided to take part. The course was organized by the Chinese Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MoHRSS) at the Enterprise Centre, which is linked to the University of Hebi.

The SIYB training not only developed their business skills and confidence, but also provided them with a space to reconnect and interact with other entrepreneurs. The three friends formed a partnership in 2014 with six other PhD graduates whom they had met during the course.

They combined their academic knowledge with what they had learned about costing and financing to start their own LED lighting company. National Lighting now employs 120 staff in Hebi city. The company also launched its first production workshop in Silicon Valley in the U.S. In 2015, they entered the second national Business Entrepreneurship Contest. Out of 30,000 contestants, they won the first prize.

Biggest market for SIYB

China is the biggest market for SIYB globally and is used by the government to promote self-employment, particularly among recent university graduates, laid-off workers from state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and rural-urban migrants. With unprecedented economic growth and urbanization, the number of college graduates and migrant workers has risen at least ten-fold in 15 years. Between 2011 and 2015, about ten million budding entrepreneurs took the SIYB course in China, the Ministry estimates.

“The SIYB programme has become a part of the SME development and employment policy in China. The government offers SIYB training through its public employment centers, which have a large outreach throughout the country. These centers, numbering 24,000 in 32 provinces, operate at the provincial, city, county, township and village/community levels,” said Pranati Mehtha, ILO Technical Officer for the SIYB programme in the Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) Unit.

“Vocational Training Centers under MoHRSS, colleges and some subcontractors working with MoHRSS also provide SIYB training. Training providers receive varying subsidies per participant from the Ministry to conduct SIYB training. For example, in Beijing the rate is RMB 1,000 (USD 147, 17) per participant,” she added.

The Nanjing Municipal Vocational Training Centre provides a broad range of skills training through its 33 public training agencies across the province. These include railway management, power engineering, software design, accounting, welding, and laboratory studies.

Since 2011, the region has seen a soaring number of new, young and successful entrepreneurs. The Centre’s SIYB Trainers have delivered a total of 800 Generate Your Business (GYB) trainings, 2,205 Start Your Business (SYB) and 73 Improve Your Business (IYB) training workshops. This amounted to a reported 160,000 participants, who were able to start and sustain 64,000 new businesses, providing more than 200,000 jobs.

SIYB trainees also receive financial support to start their enterprises. Loans of up to RMB 100,000 (USD 14,717) are available, which are interest free for the first two years. Participants are offered additional services including preferential start-up taxation, incubators, social insurance policies and accounting services to help them build their businesses.

A motor of job creation in China

Starting in 2007, the ILO handed over the implementation of SIYB to the government, which continues to expand the programme’s outreach. Over the years, MoHRSS has introduced new versions and sectoral adaptations of the original SIYB materials, such as agriculture.

Baoshan Deng, is a SIYB Senior Master Trainer, who now works at the Chinese Institute of Labour. He has been involved with developing the ILO training course since 1996.

“SIYB has proven to be a very valuable and successful tool in promoting job creation in China. It has been expanded across the country to target unemployed workers in cities, rural migrants and rural youth, army retirees, high school graduates and vulnerable groups, such as people living with HIV,” Deng said.

Since its inception in the 1980s, SIYB has become an integral part of national initiatives to stimulate economic development. With 380 Master Trainers, almost 64,740 Trainers and over 15 million beneficiaries trained, SIYB is one of the largest programmes of its kind worldwide, implemented by close to 3,340 organizations in 100 countries.