Recently, my company DHgate.com, and China-based search engine, Baidu, began a project with Beijing Normal University and the China Development and Research Foundation to help China combat a concerning global trend – graduate unemployment.

The pilot program, entitled “Ecommerce and New Job Creation”, tests a training model that coordinates business, education and government entities. Starting with a modest group of 70 students, experienced staff from DHgate.com and Baidu provide recent graduates with practical in-job training and valuable international ecommerce skills.

On completion of the course students are awarded a qualification detailing the expertise they have gained in various areas of ecommerce. Then, we will make official introductions between graduates and enterprises that will benefit from their newly acquired skills and academic background. If successful, our plan is to grow this pilot program and roll it out to other institutions across China.

While I am entirely invested in the positive impact this will have on China’s youth, my efforts are not entirely philanthropic – there is a business benefit here too.

With 400,000 China-based wholesalers and manufacturers using the DHgate platform to connect with 2.1 million global small-business buyers, I also hope that the training course will prepare students for international business and help Chinese suppliers exceed the expectation of the global marketplace.

I believe that improving the abilities of SMEs to conduct fruitful cross-border wholesale, will increase the number of international busineses that choose to source from China, and that a proportion of those will choose to do so via DHgate.

Even though the immediate value to my business is limited, this could be significantly important in the future – and I’m playing the long game. Sure, in the meantime I am implementing other ways to better the experience for users that will have a more immediate affect, but programs like this one have a deeper value too, and it feels good when efforts are rewarded in more ways than one.

Are you conducting any long-term improvement programs? Why not share your details here?