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The SEPC or Shanghai Employment Promotion Center has made assisting expats in Shanghai, especially job-seeking expats, a top priority.
The services provided by SEPC cover a range of important formalities required of expats living and working in China including obtaining recruitment permits, work visas and foreign employment permits. All the forms are in English so expats with little or no Chinese language skills will also feel comfortable stopping by and asking for assistance.
It used to be that expats contemplating a move to China faced a daunting list of questions with no easy or clear answers. Nowadays, at least in Shanghai, moving to China is as simple as SEPC.
Moreover, beside the formalities, the SEPC also works to improve necessary quality of life issues by providing expats with information on medical care and child education. They even hold cultural events and provide access to local foreign experts who can help newly arrived expats acclimate to their new life in the city. As one expat said of the SEPC, “they are more than an office that facilitates visas, they actually care about expats’ working lives.”
As one of the most business friendly and cosmopolitan cities on the mainland, Shanghai is home to over 100,000 expats working in over 400 of the world’s top companies. This makes the city itself a perfect location in which to test out expat friendly policies. Moreover, Shanghai’s international contacts will only grow larger with the recent launch of the Shanghai free trade zone.
Accordingly, a more expat oriented SEPC makes sense to Shanghai itself and to the expats living there. Indeed, the SEPC not only wants to help expats on the ground in Shanghai but also to connect with people from around the world and convince them that living and working in Shanghai is a great alternative to staying in their home country.
