For young people in the bank, invoicing doesn't start from entering the bank, the big classroom cram school in junior high school, the small town that was crazy about doing questions in high school, the higher and higher scores in college, and graduation. The academic qualifications, which have been depreciated gradually, are an integral part of the involution system. It can be said that in the growth of this generation of post-95s, involution has always occurred. Only after entering the bank, this phenomenon is more prominent.
Article | Xu Qing
Editor | Chu Ming
Operation | Xiao Xiao
Countless young people are planning or have resigned from the bank.
Two years ago, 24-year-old Ouyang submitted his resignation application. A few days before the resignation, a pregnant female colleague felt unwell and wanted to take a leave of absence to go home to rest, but the leadership did not approve. The female colleague, like Ouyang, was a teller. At that time, she was handling a business, and the leader asked her to hand over it before going home. The next day, the female colleague had a miscarriage.
Shook, 23, also a teller, wanted to quit after being 10 minutes late one morning last week. He had a cold that day, so he slept a little longer, and when he arrived at the bank, he found that the escort car had been waiting for him for 10 minutes. At the ensuing morning meeting, the leader confronted colleagues across the company criticizing him for making "low-level mistakes." In addition to the fine of 500 yuan and the deduction of the performance bonus of about 5,000 yuan this quarter, Shuke has to write another thousand-word review. In the
Weibo super chat "Have you resigned from the bank today", there are tens of thousands of bankers similar to Ouyang and Shuke. . Whether it is the six major banks (China Agricultural and Industrial Postal Savings), joint-stock banks, policy banks, foreign banks, after they came in, they all felt high pressure, reduced salary, failed promotion paths, and boring work. A series of problems began to lose hope in the banking industry. They punch in the super chat every day, counting the days and looking forward to the day of resignation.
Everything young people experience in the bank points to a word that has suddenly become widely used this year: involution.
Involution, also known as overdensification, was proposed by cultural anthropologist Alexander Gordonwiese to describe the changing laws of social and cultural patterns. He believes that when a cultural model enters the final fixed state, it is gradually limited to the constant complication and refinement within itself, thus stagnant and unable to transform into a new cultural form. In the current social context, "involution" is often used to describe fierce but ineffective competition.
For young people in the bank today, involution doesn't start with entering the bank. The large classroom remedial classes in junior high school, the small towns who were crazy about quizzing in high school, the higher and higher grades in college, and the increasingly depreciated academic qualifications after graduation, are all part of the invoicing system. It can be said that in the growth of this generation of post-95s, involution has been happening all the time. It is only after entering the bank that this phenomenon becomes more prominent.
▲ Bank staff handles business at the counter. Figure / Visual China
The threshold is getting higher and higher
Some people are considering resigning, but the bank is getting more and more difficult to enter.
Shuke felt the fierce competition when he recruited last fall. He is a 2020 graduate, studying accounting at a "double non" university in the Northwest. At that time, major banks were holding seminars, but they were only held in 985 and 211 schools. Several times, Shuke took a taxi to participate in more than ten kilometers away, and listened to it while standing. As soon as I walked into the lecture hall, hundreds of students crowded the classroom. "There were several floors of people standing behind the last row."
Shuke's hometown is in Jiangsu. After the presentation, he voted for more than a dozen domestic joint-stock banks, and all of them chose Jiangsu outlets.
According to his recollection, the recruitment process of each bank is similar.A series of personal information, after passing the online application, you can enter the written test stage. The written test is offline, you can choose the test center close to you, but the interview after that requires him to go back to Jiangsu to participate.
Every bank has more than one interview, 2 as few as 4 as many. Shuke finally interviewed 5 banks, and went through a series of procedures. I don't know how many round-trip air tickets from Northwest China to Jiangsu were bought. Calculated, it cost at least more than 6,000 yuan.
Shuke is not the most expensive. One of his classmates also bought the "secret training class before bank examination" service of an educational institution, which cost 5,980 yuan. On the flyer of the educational institution, the words "Secret Training of Major Banks" are very conspicuous, and a small line at the bottom also reads "The Word-of-mouth Choice of Millions of Bank Candidates".
"Million Bank Candidates" is not an exaggeration.
According to the data provided by an educational institution, the overall reporting ratio of the bank is maintained at about 13:1, and it is increasing year by year. In 2019, 4,577 people were recruited by the People's Bank of China, , and 290,000 people were enrolled; by 2020, 4,300 people were recruited, and the actual number of applicants reached 338,000.
There is obviously a huge gap between the number of recruits and the number of applicants. In order to "brush people", banks can only try to set up barriers. In addition to round after round of interviews, the preliminary written test is a hurdle that cannot be ignored.
Ouyang studied finance and graduated in 2018. When looking for a job, in addition to the graduate and public examinations, the rest of the classmates around him were preparing for the bank's written exam. Everyone has a set of " Bank Recruitment Exam " published by an educational institution. It is as thick as a brick and contains 615 pages of past real questions, including mathematical operations, logical reasoning, English, economics, law, computer, etc. Various topics in accounting etc. After brushing the questions for a while, Ouyang passed the exam in one of the six major universities.
In September this year, Bank of China made a hot search by relying on its difficult written test questions. A candidate said that the range of topics is also very large, including the three-layer matrix, the static energy formula of particles, the principle of the motion of celestial bodies in the solar system, and the Laurent series. Another candidate complained, "I feel like recruiting reserve academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences".
education is also a filter condition. During the interview, Shuke met a graduate student of China Southern Airlines, an undergraduate student of Nanjing University and Nanjing Audit College. Xiao Cheng, who has been admitted to a policy bank, also found that the academic qualifications of his colleagues who joined him are frighteningly high, and they all come from 985 and 211 schools. The fierce competition of
reminds Shuke of his college entrance examination. The exam is approaching. Every day there are endless papers and questions to be done. Can go to a good school. Compared with the college entrance examination, the pressure of the bank on him is not small, because the identity of the freshman is only once, and it will be more difficult to pass the entrance examination if he misses this year.
Perhaps because there were enough banks for interviews, Shuke finally joined a joint-stock bank. But like other young people who entered the bank, within a few months, he felt a huge gap.
▲ Bank clerk. Figure / Visual China
KPI increases, salary does not increase
Shuke decided to take the bank exam after following his father's advice. In my father's eyes, the bank is stable, makes a lot of money, the work unit is close to home, and there is no wind and sun. It is a decent and good job.
Like Shuke, Chuyu University studied accounting. After graduation, she didn't think about what she should do, and her family thought of the bank for her as a matter of course.
More than ten years ago, Chu Yu's uncle entered the local banking system and is now a department executive. Everyone doesn't know how much her uncle earns, but every year during the Spring Festival, her uncle gives her the most New Year money. When others give 100, the uncle gives 500, and when others give 200, the uncle gives 1000.
Myths about bank wealth still linger in people's minds, legendsBank employees are given small gold nuggets on their birthdays. Banks are still considered to be a "golden rice bowl", which is several levels higher than the "iron rice bowl" of ordinary state-owned enterprises. If
is pushed forward by 10 years, this statement is not an exaggeration. In 1998, the country opened commercial housing, and in 2001, China joined the WTO, and the banking industry entered a stage of rapid development. 2003-2013 was the "golden decade" for banks. During this decade, the total assets of the banking industry increased by 5 times, the after-tax profit increased by 54 times, and the salary of bank employees was higher than that of other industries. After
80, Chen Zhen joined a foreign-funded bank in Guangzhou in 2006. Her basic salary that year was 2,500 yuan. After that, her salary increased by about 5%-10% every year. After working for 6 years, Chen Zhen changed jobs 4 times and got a monthly salary of about 20,000 in 2012. That year, the housing price in Guangzhou was around 14,000 yuan per square meter.
But now, only those who have actually entered the banking system know how different they are facing than they were ten years ago - the best days of banking are over. At a time when Internet financial products are very popular, more and more people deposit their money in online banks. People use "Huabei" and "Beibei" to apply for small loans. The procedures are brief and the process is efficient. The Internet finance industry has taken away the profits of the banking industry.
On September 23, PricewaterhouseCoopers released the "2020 Semi-annual Review and Prospects of China's Banking Industry", showing that in the first half of 2020, the net profit of China's listed banks decreased by 9.05% year-on-year, the first overall negative growth in bank history.
The first and foremost result of the drop in profits is a drop in employee salaries.
Relying on his uncle's connections, Chu Yu joined a joint-stock bank and became a marketing manager. The monthly salary is about 2,500 yuan - the same as Chen Zhen 14 years ago. Colleagues around her are not a few years older than her. They have worked in the bank for three to five years. They work diligently every month. After including various benefits such as bonuses and housing allowances, they earn five or six thousand dollars.
Shuke's monthly salary is in the early 2000s. He rents a small house very close to the outlet, and the monthly rent is 2,000 yuan. After paying the rent, there is not enough money left to even eat. Since he has been working for half a year, he needs the "assistance" of his parents almost every month.
Chen Zhen found that the salary increase of banks has decreased in recent years. Since 5 years ago, the rate of ordinary salary adjustment has changed from 10% to 5%, then 3% and 2%, and it has been decreasing year by year.
's 2020 semi-annual report shows that cash paid to employees by 36 A-share listed banks dropped by 590 million yuan compared with the same period last year. Among the top six banks, Postal Savings Bank fell by 13.8%. Bank of Communications and Construction Bank saw wages fall by more than 6%.
Another change is a significant increase in employee KPIs.
Each bank has started "full-staff marketing", not only for sales positions, but also for tellers to sell products or make deposits. The bank where Shuke works requires each teller to apply for 10 credit cards, more than a dozen ETCs, and 6 million deposits every month. If you can't do it, you will not be fined this month, and if the KPI is not completed until the next month, you will still face a fine of several hundred yuan. When the pressure was greatest, Shuke and his classmates who worked at another bank exchanged credit cards.
Chu Yu's KPI is to pull 4 million deposits and a certain amount of financial management and loans in two months. The bank set an indicator of "average daily deposits", that is, Chu Yu must have at least 4 million deposits in his account every day. This is to prevent employees from slacking off and only working until the end of the month. When
saw the number of 4 million, Chu Yu was very desperate. She has made countless calls, often just after getting through, without saying a word, the other party hangs up. A colleague told her that if there were too many such times, big data would judge the phone number as "not high quality of call" and mark it as a harassing call. Chu Yu specifically called her friends in the real estate industry, and the two chatted for an hour to ensure the quality of the call and not be flagged.
"All-staff marketing" requires grassroots employees to put in a lot of effort to maintain customersThe householder, the leader told Chu Yu that in addition to calling and meeting with customers, they should also greet customers from time to time. Even if the other party does not do business, they must send blessings on New Years and festivals.
In Chu Yu's view, sales is service work, there is no personal time at all, life and work are mixed together, friends are customers, customers are friends, "too business". As the Mid-Autumn Festival approached, she saw that her colleagues were applying for a box of mooncakes to "maintain customers".
▲ Staff assist customers to experience VTM remote teller machines. Figure / Visual China
Path failure
In the joint-stock bank where Shuke works, tellers are divided into preparatory level, level 0, and level 1, which increase in turn. The longer they work in the bank, the higher the level.
Originally, there were two common promotion paths in the bank. One is to transfer from a teller to a relationship manager, and to become a senior relationship manager and private banking consultant after continuously completing the assessment standards. In this process, the account manager has the opportunity to compete for the president. The other is to be promoted from accountant to head of counter, and then compete for accounting supervisors and vice presidents of grass-roots outlets, and then march to provincial branches and headquarters, rising step by step.
In the decade of the fastest development of banks, it usually takes 5-8 years to complete this road, but at present, it is difficult for young people to see the hope of promotion.
A colleague of Shuke's acquaintance has worked for 10 years before becoming a Level 5 teller. He has a provident fund of about 3,000 yuan and a monthly salary of over 10,000. Thinking of such working years and salary level, Shuke sighed: "Isn't it delicious to work on the Internet? Once you graduate, you will be at the level that others have worked hard for 10 years." Shook didn't vote. The six major banks have many outlets and penetrate into towns at all levels. According to the principle of near-distribution, many new tellers will be sent there, making promotion particularly difficult. If you are lucky enough, you will be promoted from the county to the township after working for four or five years, and then you will be promoted from the township to the urban area after working for another four or five years. After the front line is stretched, the bank that is promoted to the province does not know how long it will take, but can only endure year after year.
Shuke has been to the outlets of the six major banks. Many of the tellers are very old, and the lobby managers of some outlets have gray hair.
Chen Zhen also feels that it is not as easy to move up now as it used to be. My colleagues at the time did not change jobs and stayed at the old employer. The current salary is the same as that of Chen Zhen in 2012.
What makes young people even more hopeless is that as long as the employees are recruited by the school, whether they are graduate students of famous schools or undergraduates of ordinary universities, they must start as tellers, and only after 2-3 years of work can they be transferred to account managers. , do sales jobs that look "more promising". As a result, the situation that Shu Ke said came into being: "I really didn't expect that a graduate student from a famous school would compete with you for a teller position."
Because of his uncle's relationship, Chu Yu did not work as a teller, but directly became a marketing manager. In his uncle's vision, Chu Yu completed the KPI assessment step by step, and could become a formal account manager, and then went on the same path as he did back then.
But Chu Yu didn't want to continue making harassing calls. In her opinion, the road to rise is not so broad. After this KPI, there are higher KPIs waiting for her, "KPIs never end." She simply gave up her efforts and arrived at the company on time every day, sitting at her workstation and playing with her mobile phone.
Because of boredom, Chu Yu often observes other colleagues in the line. She found that the new employees in the bank are all born in the 90s, and the leadership is very old, most of them are born in the 60s and 70s, and very few are born in the 80s.
This coincides with the statistics in the bank's annual report.
China Construction Bank's 2017 annual report shows that among the current employees, there are 135,000 employees between the ages of 41 and 50, accounting for 38.45%, and 48,000 employees between the ages of 51 and 59, accounting for 13.7%. After all, half of the employees are over 40 years old.
Agricultural Bank of China had 191,000 employees between the ages of 41 and 50 in 2017, accounting for39.2%, there are 119,000 employees over 51 years old, accounting for 24.5%, that is to say, more than 60% of employees are over 40 years old.
From 2017 to 2019, the proportion of employees aged 30 and below in Agricultural Bank of China was 20.7%, 20.0%, and 19.3%, respectively, decreasing year by year; while the proportion of employees aged 51 and above was 24.5%, 25.2%, and 27.4%, respectively, increasing year by year. rise.
This means that, like the "35-year-old threshold" of big Internet companies, some young people in the bank will disappear when the time comes.
▲ The simulated robot in the counter of China Construction Bank may replace human workers in the future. Figure / Visual China
assembly line, programmed
Every morning at 6:30, Shuke gets up, washes and has breakfast, he has to go to the outlet before 7:45, and then has a morning meeting, collects money, counts vouchers, and waits for customers to come in to handle it business. From 12:00 noon to 2:00 pm is the rest time, but the unfinished important business will drag him until 1:30, leaving him only half an hour to eat the cold lunch. 5:00 pm is the off-duty time written in the labor contract, but no employee can go out of the outlet on time, order money, pay money, scan vouchers, wait for the cash truck, and a series of things are still waiting for him. Sometimes in time for a meeting, I can only get home at 8:00 or 9:00 in the evening.
In the bank, what you do after 5 o'clock does not count as overtime, and there is no overtime pay. Most of the work of
bank tellers is not complicated, mainly deposit and withdrawal, transfer, account opening, loss reporting, and some corporate business, etc. These do not require long learning, and can be proficient in a few weeks of training. But just because it was too simple and took a long time, sitting at the counter became an assembly line job, and Shuke felt more and more like a "new Foxconn worker".
But unlike Foxconn, banks are state-owned enterprises, and there is also a set of rules and regulations that are passed down from generation to generation and unique to state-owned enterprises.
Women can't have bangs, men can't have beards, all employees can't perm and dye their hair, they must wear uniforms, and socks must be black. Whenever the "Top 1000 Banks" and "Top 100 Banks" are selected, the plants in the outlets must not have dead leaves, and the counters must not be dusty. After the Friday house cleaning, the president will personally check to see if it has been cleaned in white gloves.
Chu Yu's bank stipulates that she cannot be late. She walked into the branch at 8:31 one day last month. She was 1 minute late and was fined 200 yuan. The leader told her that she must transfer to the bank account on the same day. It will double to 400 yuan.
When sitting at the counter, 360-degree surveillance without dead ends surrounds every teller. You can't drink water at the counter. If you want to go to the toilet, you have to tidy up the desktop, turn off the computer, lock the box, and then straighten the chair before you can temporarily leave the workstation. Shuke finds it troublesome, so he doesn't drink much water and doesn't go to the toilet much. After a long time, his colleagues nicknamed him "Cactus" because he thought he had special powers.
has regular meetings, morning meetings in the morning, department meetings every Monday and Wednesday evenings, and group meetings every Friday night. The leaders kept their mouths shut about such chronological terms as "comrade" and "low-level mistakes".
Working in a bank means not taking time off. Even if you suffer from angina pectoris, you must start reporting from the manager in charge, and report to the sub-branch. After the sub-branch manager approves, the branch will continue to approve. After the approval, you can put down your work and go home. One of Ouyang's colleagues still came to work with a low fever, while the colleague who had a miscarriage came back from a rest, still working as he should. It's just that after she became pregnant again, she learned to ask for leave two days in advance.
is a set of cumbersome rules that many young people cannot adapt to.
Shuke loves to play. He likes to travel when he is in college. He often gathers his friends to drink together until dawn. But after coming to the bank, going to bed early and getting up early became his new habit. In the past, when he was studying, he often found a weekend to go out to play across provinces. Now this has become an extravagant hope. Once he goes out, he must be prepared to be fined and criticized for being late the next day. While
was not used to it, a large number ofThe repetitive work of many people does not bring a sense of value, and many people learn to mess around in the bank. Once, Chu Yu accidentally pushed open the door of a conference room and found that many colleagues were hiding inside and secretly playing with their mobile phones. The conference room was created after the merger of the two departments. These people seem to have been created, but they have not been laid off. Because it is a state-owned enterprise, unless there is a major mistake, the bank will not voluntarily dismiss employees.
Chen Zhen found that many people actually wanted to leave the bank all the time, and it was "grievance" to mention the bank. But as long as you stay here for a year or two, you're chained. The work of the counter is simple and does not train people's abilities. After a long time, people become lazy and tired. They no longer have the fighting spirit and courage to try other industries, and they have no time and energy to learn new knowledge.
In her opinion, banking is one of the most introverted industries. In order to enter the bank job, the fresh graduates squeezed their heads and put in more energy than before, but after coming in, they were faced with such a situation. Not only did their salaries decrease day by day, but people were gradually "alienated".
After realizing this, Shuke remembered that an interview was over last winter. It was midnight when he flew back from Jiangsu to the northwest. He took the airport bus to a place where it was convenient to take a taxi, and waited 20 minutes before getting on the bus. It was snowing heavily at that time, and his whole body froze, thinking: "Is it worth doing this, and it consumes energy and money?"
▲ Fuzhou, the intelligent counter service area in the business hall of the Bank of China. Figure / Visual China
The fled, struggling
young people are leaving the bank. On
Weibo, in the super chat titled "Have you resigned from the bank today", people called each other "inmates", and everyone invented a series of slang words, such as "longan" and "kneeling staff" instead of "teller" , "line cockroach" instead of "line leader". For them, going into a bank job is like "going to jail" and everyone is struggling to escape.
Ouyang analyzed that most of the fresh graduates who entered the bank after graduation, most of them graduated from accounting and finance majors, they are often of the same type - the grades are above average, and they were admitted to good universities by brushing the test questions, but There is no clear goal and work direction, and I don't know what I like. Even when choosing a major, it is also the advice of parents and friends.
When they enter the bank, they feel boring, high pressure, and hopeless. Even if they still can't figure out what they like, they will be sure what they don't like.
In Chen Zhen's opinion, the parents of the post-90s generation are mostly homeowners. In the case of high housing prices in big cities, young people are divided into two camps: parents who help to buy a house and those who can't afford a house, no matter which camp it is , they will no longer be able to "tighten their belts and live" like the post-60s and post-70s in the past. The end result is that young people leave the bank early before they can be promoted.
Chu Yu and Shuke are planning to resign, but they haven't figured out their next step. Chu Yu likes to do creative content work, but she has no relevant work experience before. She is thinking about whether to take the postgraduate entrance examination next year or find another job first. Now, how to explain to the family, especially the uncle is a difficult problem.
's uncle had already achieved a position where she didn't need to run the business in person, but in order to help her become a regular, he has recently been attracting customers everywhere, and he immediately introduced them to Chu Yu when he found them. Chu Yu felt sorry for her uncle and worried that her uncle did not understand the reason for her resignation. Because in the bank, "well done" does exist.
Chu Yu has a colleague who is full of fighting spirit every day. She is very accustomed to the "business" in the bank and regards making money as her motivation. valued by leaders.
technicians are not bad. Major banks have increased recruitment positions for IT architects, technology platform architects, and operation and maintenance development architects. The average salary is around 12,000-40,000 yuan, which is much higher than that of account managers and ordinary tellers.
A female colleague of Ouyang was promoted very quickly. Her family opened a company, and every time she made a deposit, it was 7 figures. Banks assess deposits at the end of each monthIf the payment is short of tens of millions, the leader will find the female colleague and ask her father to transfer tens of millions to the bank account, and then transfer it back after the check is completed at the end of the month.
These three young people are what the banking industry needs most.
However, at the moment, the bank is still expanding the scale of school recruitment despite a year-on-year decrease of 9.4% in net profit in the first half of the year. Since August this year, perhaps in response to the call of national policies to ease employment pressure, large banks such as Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank and other large banks have launched the 2021 autumn recruitment in advance, not only including the graduates in 2021 and 2020 into the scope of recruitment, but also the scale of recruitment. It has also increased significantly, and some branches have increased by more than 30% compared with last year.
involution is still further intensifying.
When Ouyang resigned, the process was dragged on for a whole month. In the bank, the turnover rate is related to the performance of the leadership, and the old president is about to be transferred, and he wants to drag this departure to the new president.
(Shuke, Chu Yu, Ouyang, Chen Zhen, and Xiaocheng are all pseudonyms in the text.)
Reference:
1. Caixin: China's first negative profit growth in banking People say goodbye to banks
3.Beijing Business Daily: The bank's spring recruitment curtain opens the "technical flow" of talents
4.Chunwen education: People's Bank of China 2019 recruitment examination announcement (4577 people)
5. Employment guidance for fresh graduates: 2020 People's Bank of China Recruitment and competitive pressure analysis
6. Youth Daily: The average age of employees of large state-owned banks is increasing
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