Search for skilled workers moves inland (4)

According to the city's labor authority, the average annual income of Western-style cooks in Beijing was 35,839 yuan ($5,758) in 2011, far lower than the city's average salary of 50,415 yuan in 2010.

"Being a Western-style cook was a decent job in Beijing back in the 1980s," said Wang, who used to work at the Beijing Hotel. He pointed out that cooks working in a city's few international hotels in the 1980s got relatively higher salaries and had a great sense of job satisfaction.

But the catering industry now offers the second-lowest salary in the city, according to Beijing Statistics Bureau.

The low income leads to job discrimination and also discourages young people from joining the sector.

Yan Xishuang, dean of the Cooking Technology and Nutrition Department of Beijing Union University, said no more than 10 percent of the department's graduates end up as cooks.

As long as they can find another job, they don't want to be cooks, Yan said, pointing out that some of his former students were now secretaries or cookbook editors.

Guo Teng recently studied Western cuisine at a vocational school in Beijing, but has yet to decide whether to work in a restaurant or start his own business.

"I want to be an entrepreneur rather than a cook," Guo added.

The discrimination has already attracted the local government's attention. Raising the social status and income of skilled workers has been included in the Beijing education commission's long-term development plan as a major way to resolve the recruitment problem of vocational high schools.