China is facing a shortfall of 600,000 operators of digital-control machine tools, a serious impairment to the utilization of high-grade equipment.

"Statistics show the effective utilization ratio of high-grade digital control machine tools stands at around 25 percent. This is mainly caused by the shortage of high-level digital control skills," said an official with the Ministry of Labor and Social Security on Tuesday at the close of an national competition of digital control skills in Beijing.

The competition was jointly sponsored by the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Science and three other government departments.

Digital control machine tools have become standard equipment in modern manufacturing.

China is short of technical workers in general to maintain its rate of economic growth. According to the Ministry of Labor and Social Security, China has an urban labor force of 260 million.

Around a third of them technical workers, of whom only four percent have mastered medium or high level skills.

The situation has prompted the government to strengthen technical training.

Source: Xinhua