Do you need a bachelor's degree to apply for a job in operations? The threshold for cross-border employment is getting higher

Is it possible to do cross-border e-commerce if your English level is not above level 6?

In the eyes of many industry insiders, cross-border e-commerce used to be the best stage for grassroots counterattacks. Many people with junior high school education were able to complete class transition with the help of Amazon, and a monthly income of 100,000 yuan was not a dream. There were also many people from other fields who switched to cross-border business. Although they did not understand English, they could communicate with overseas consumers without obstacles with the help of Google Translate, making their products hot-selling...

Is this situation gradually changing? In the current peak season for job hunting, many job seekers have found that many cross-border companies require a level 6 English proficiency test and a bachelor's degree or above for Amazon operations positions! So now those with low education and poor English skills can no longer do well in cross-border e-commerce?

Cross-border e-commerce has gone through a period of wild development. In the process of moving towards intensive cultivation at full speed, practitioners in the entire chain of the industry will naturally have other feelings and questions: Is salary linked to academic qualifications? Will Amazon be surrounded by more educated talents in the future?

Education ≠ ability? Are cross-border e-commerce requirements for education and foreign language proficiency high?

" To engage in cross-border e-commerce, are there high requirements for academic qualifications and foreign language proficiency? If my English level is lower than level 6 , will I be unable to do a good job in cross-border e-commerce ? " Many outsiders always have this concern when they want to enter the cross-border e-commerce industry.

In reality, cross-border e-commerce companies obviously have different views on this issue.

During the job search, an Amazon operator found that many Amazon companies have already used CET-4 and CET-6 as the criteria for judging whether one meets the employment conditions. Some companies even require CET-6, otherwise one will not even be eligible for an interview. In this regard, the operator lamented that he could not meet the above standards. Fortunately, he entered the industry early and accumulated a lot of work experience. Otherwise, he would not be able to find a job according to the standards of some companies now. However, he is still afraid that as he gets older, there will be fewer and fewer job opportunities in the future.

The editor looked through the recruitment requirements of many cross-border e-commerce companies and found that although some companies have relaxed the recruitment requirements to junior colleges, most companies regard passing CET -4 and a bachelor's degree or above as important assessment conditions for recruitment. For example, Anker Innovations released an Amazon operation recruitment in Shanghai, which has the following requirements:

1. Bachelor degree or above, any major, statistics, economics, marketing and other related majors are preferred;

2. Have strong logical thinking ability, be proficient in data analysis, be skilled in using data analysis tools and software, and be familiar with the preparation of statistical analysis reports;

3. Able to withstand certain work pressure, excellent learning ability, and good communication skills;

4. Candidates with working experience in cross-border e-commerce platforms (content/business analysis/Google Analytics) are preferred;

5. Proficient in English, or proficient in one of the following languages: Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Italian or Chinese, provided that the English level is at least Level 4 .

Will people who are not good at English and do not have a bachelor's degree be able to do cross-border e-commerce work?

Many Amazon operators think the answer is no. In their opinion, in the actual work process, they will find that high academic qualifications are not very useful in Amazon, because the company only looks at performance, and writing copy, replying to customer emails and other tasks can be completed with the help of translation software. The rigid requirement of CET-4 and CET-6 in recruitment is more important than ability. "If you have a high academic qualification, the best way out is to be a civil servant, a public institution or other regular job, followed by a foreign company, then a large factory, and then a listed company. Amazon operations can basically be divided into jobs that anyone can do."

An Amazon operator shared his own experience, saying that he had indeed passed the CET-6, but he clearly felt that it was not very helpful in his work. "The CET-6 is mainly for exams, and it rarely involves expressions in daily work."

It is understood that there are indeed many people who are not good at English, but can still do well on Amazon. This situation was especially common a few years ago. " In 2017 , several bosses in our company made a lot of money on the Japanese site by relying on Google Translate . " There are many similar examples. At that time, Amazon was in its bonus period. It can be said that it was an era of picking up money everywhere. Many people could make money as long as their products were put on the shelves. This also led to Amazon's entry threshold being too low. Many people with elementary school education worked alone on Amazon and still made a lot of money. As the team expanded, they also established a company.

Now that Amazon is gradually entering the era of brand operation, there are more debates about academic qualifications, etc. Many people in the industry still feel that cross-border e-commerce does not have too high requirements for academic qualifications, English proficiency, etc., while others hold the opposite opinion.

A cross-border e-commerce boss said that cross-border e-commerce does not have high requirements for operations. A college degree or above and a level 4 English proficiency level are sufficient for most companies' operations positions. Educational background does not equal one's ability, nor does it equal the degree of matching with the position. In detail, making money depends on brains, resources, and language. Compared with academic background, whether Amazon operators are studious, able to endure hardships, and have ideas is more important. If an operator can make a product explode, even if he has only a junior high school education, he will be accepted.

Another cross-border e-commerce boss said that academic qualifications play a certain role. Five years ago, their company's recruitment threshold was still college degree or above, but now the recruitment threshold has been raised to bachelor's degree or above, and people with bachelor's degree are more cost-effective.

An Amazon operator said that many companies mainly consider the operator's work experience and personal ability during interviews, but mastering an extra language is actually a plus. When competing with others for the same position, if the years of work experience and professional knowledge are similar, then those with a Level 6 certificate will often have more competitive advantages.

"Education is an important condition for all walks of life to reduce the cost of interviews. Most people will say that education is not important, and ability is more important, but education is still considered when recruiting. This is not about discrimination against education, but a cost-effectiveness issue. For the same salary, newcomers with bachelor's degrees or above are often more cost-effective." An industry insider said that as Amazon becomes more and more popular, more and more people are entering this industry, and the industry entry threshold has been raised invisibly. Cross-border e-commerce companies have more choices, so they regard education as an important criterion for selecting talents, especially for college students without work experience. English and education are their stepping stones to enter a company. Because education is the first impression left on recruiting companies, it is not just a piece of paper, but also reflects your expression ability, learning ability, logical ability, thinking ability, execution ability and self-discipline during the school stage to a certain extent, and these factors are closely related to whether you can do a good job. So in the interview and recruitment process, newcomers basically rely on academic qualifications to add points. The higher the academic qualifications, the greater the score.

Another industry insider also believes that from the perspective of the company, different academic qualifications and different knowledge will have a certain impact on whether one can do a good job. Generally speaking, people with higher academic qualifications will have better logical thinking and innovative thinking. However, this statement is not absolute. There are many operations people with associate degrees who do well, and there are also many operations people with bachelor's degrees who are particularly poor. But overall, the wording of operations people with associate degrees in product descriptions and replies to customer emails is slightly worse. Most operations people with bachelor's degrees have an ability to understand things, especially learning operations or development logic, which can easily meet the company's requirements, and the proportion of those who meet the requirements is slightly higher than those with associate degrees.

If 10 out of 100 college graduates are qualified for the same position, while 90 out of 100 undergraduates are qualified, then why should I bother to find those 10 people out of 100? After all, the risk and time cost are less.

In addition, with the increasing competition in the Amazon market, the daily work of operations is no longer as simple as looking at data, adjusting advertisements, and optimizing product pages. Instead, it requires a higher learning ability, a love of specialization, the ability to quickly adapt to the direction of Amazon's algorithms, and strong execution capabilities. Therefore, there is definitely a role behind a high degree of education.

Education is important for Amazon, but how important is it? Industry insiders generally believe that education is just a bonus, not a must.

“ Education is a stepping stone for many people to enter a company , but for operators with work experience, while considering academic qualifications, they will regard past work experience as a more important measurement indicator, from which we can to a certain extent see their ability to adapt to the position, their understanding ability and their execution ability.

Interest and learning ability are the most decisive factors for doing well on Amazon. Both of them will enable you to conduct in-depth research, study product selection, and mine and analyze data, so as to accumulate experience and finally produce results. "

Amazing! Anker Innovations has 790 employees with a master's degree or above

In addition to operations positions, do cross-border e-commerce companies have educational requirements for other positions? What is the educational background of employees at well-known cross-border e-commerce giants Anker Innovations and Youkeshu? The editor captured the specific situation of the two in 2021.

Anker Innovations has 1,605 R&D staff and 731 sales staff. Overall, there are 790 employees with a master's degree or above, the highest proportion is 2,341 employees with a bachelor's degree, and there are 401 employees with an associate degree or below.

Anker Innovations founder Yang Meng has a postgraduate degree. His previous work experience is also very impressive. From February 2006 to July 2011, he worked as a senior software engineer at Google Inc.

Youkeshu has 320 sales staff, 160 production staff, 32 employees with a master's degree or above, 609 employees with a bachelor's degree, and 389 employees with a college degree or below. Youkeshu founder Xiao Siqing also has a high level of education , with an EMBA from China Europe International Business School.

As we all know, Anker Innovations pays great attention to R&D, while Youkeshu is much inferior in this regard. The two companies have different positioning, and the educational background of their employees is also different overall. It is obvious that Anker Innovations has too many highly educated talents with master's degrees or above.

These two cross-border sellers also reflect the current status of cross-border e-commerce companies. Although it is said that it is becoming increasingly difficult to do business on Amazon, this platform still has a lot of room for development. Whether it is a general distribution, fine store, boutique or branded company, at this stage, almost all of them can find a way of survival suitable for themselves in the Amazon ecosystem. Different types of cross-border e-commerce companies have different requirements for employees, so on the big stage of Amazon, workers with different educational levels are basically still competing on the same stage.

Apart from Anker Innovations, are there a high proportion of highly educated workers in other cross-border e-commerce companies?

"I know of a leading company in the industry that has many employees who have returned from overseas and have 985 degrees. There is also a super boutique company whose employees generally have high academic qualifications. What is even more incredible is that a certain small company basically recruits employees who are from 211, 985, and have masters' degrees." An industry insider responded that as far as he knows, there are many cross-border e-commerce companies around him whose employees generally have high academic qualifications.

The boss of a cross-border e-commerce company said that the company used to welcome employees with masters' degrees and returnees, and gave these employees the preferential treatment of higher basic salary. The company also hired many highly educated talents, but unfortunately these employees had too low stability and would resign on their own initiative after not working for long. He personally felt that the reason for the loss of so many highly educated talents was that jobs such as Amazon operations did not require very high technology, and a college degree or above was basically enough. Therefore, it was a bit of a waste of talent for highly educated talents such as masters to do operations (except for those who wanted to start a business and accumulate experience), which resulted in their skills not being brought into play. In addition, cross-border e-commerce companies are performance-oriented companies. Whoever can build up the account will be more powerful and will get a higher commission. Amazon operations are simply sales. Some highly educated employees may not be good at data analysis, which leads to a gap in income and a psychological gap, so they have to resign.

"So now companies are beginning to prefer people with bachelor's degrees during the recruitment process, as these people are relatively more stable. Except for a few very powerful cross-border companies, most cross-border companies will not consider the issue of academic qualifications for experienced operators. Especially for small and medium-sized companies, they will not recruit highly educated employees, firstly because they don't need them, and secondly because they can't keep them."

However, many industry insiders predict that it is undeniable that with the development of the platform, the refinement of work, and the stratification and grading of operational content, the future cross-border e-commerce market will be more inclined towards highly educated talents, and the group with a master's degree or above will become large.

However, Amazon is not mature enough to meet the need for highly educated talents. Amazon itself is an industry with a very low minimum and a very high maximum. One person or a team of thousands of people, whether they are good or not, professional or not, can work at Amazon. At the same time, there is information asymmetry in the industry, and the entire industry lacks standards. Master's degrees and other high education are not that important for the time being. This situation will inevitably improve in the future. When compliance management of each subdivided position becomes a phenomenon, thresholds will also emerge.

Are education and salary linked? Many people can get a good salary even after graduating from junior high school.

Is academic qualification linked to salary?

According to Youkeshu's public information, the fixed salary of Youkeshu employees is based on job value and personal performance, while the floating salary is determined based on the company's performance and personal performance. Youkeshu said that in the future, the company's salary will continue to tilt towards core talents, and the company's salary system will continue to follow the performance orientation, further strengthening the corresponding relationship between performance and incentives to promote the improvement of the company's core competitiveness.

I believe this is also the practice adopted by many cross-border e-commerce companies, but a phenomenon that cannot be ignored is that there are still many cross-border e-commerce companies that not only consider academic qualifications as a plus point for whether to admit someone, but also consider it as one of the important criteria for setting basic salary. "In a large cross-border e-commerce company in Shenzhen, for the same work experience, the basic salary of graduates from 211 universities is increased by 1,000 , and the basic salary of postgraduates or 985 universities is increased by 2,000 . " said an Amazon operator.

As we all know, the salary for Amazon operations is mainly composed of base salary plus commission. This means that even if the base salary for operations staff with different academic qualifications is different, if people with lower academic qualifications can sell more products, they can rely on commissions to make their overall salary surpass that of employees with higher academic qualifications.

"I have seen many undergraduates who do worse than junior college students. There is even an employee who only has a junior high school education. I didn't think highly of him at first, so I didn't offer him a high base salary. Who knew that he had very good business thinking ability, got the hang of the job quickly, and did very well. Now his base salary plus commission has exceeded 10,000 yuan . "

To summarize the views of industry insiders, the essence of Amazon's operation is to return to sales positions. A high degree is only a stepping stone to enter this industry. At the beginning, the base salary may be 500-1000 yuan higher than that of low-educated people. However, if your comprehensive ability, especially your performance, is much lower than that of other colleagues, no matter how good your degree is, it will be useless. Therefore, a high degree does not mean a high income. The best degree is to be able to create sales performance.

Similarly, years of work experience do not equal work ability, which many Amazon bosses are deeply aware of.

"We have recruited several senior operators who claimed to be very good, but they were basically no match for the rookies who had only been trained for three months. The policies and algorithms of the Amazon platform are constantly changing, and the so-called past experience may have been applicable to the past. If you do not have a strong learning ability to adapt to the changing times, you will be left behind by the times." An Amazon boss said that an excellent cross-border e-commerce company is one that can continuously produce popular products, and many old products will be replaced sooner or later, so employees must maintain a strong learning ability at all times.

Another Amazon boss also said that after recent interviews and communications, some Amazon operations people with many years of work experience did not meet his expectations, and their length of service was not very valuable, and they were not as good as employees who had just graduated for one or two years.

In fact, no matter how cross-border e-commerce companies view the academic qualifications, English proficiency, etc. of operations, if the majority of Amazon employees want to stay in this industry for a long time, they still need to have sufficient abilities and continue to learn to enrich themselves.

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