Yang is immensely proud of his 13-year-old son. The middle-school student from Hangzhou has won artificial intelligence model-building competitions across China and has 136,000 followers on social media platform Xiaohongshu. Despite his son’s talent, Yang was unsure of how to nurture it in the fast-moving world of AI.
“We’re just an ordinary family,” Yang said, requesting to be identified only by his last name due to concerns over online attention surrounding his minor son. “Our biggest challenge is resources. We don’t know what he should be learning or the best way for him to learn it. Right now, he’s mostly teaching himself.”
Chinese companies are steadily expanding their talent pipeline from university graduates to undergraduates — and, increasingly, to teenagers. The shift reflects a severe shortage of elite engineers, growing competition among AI companies, and a belief that exceptional talent needs to be identified long before it enters the workforce.
Tech Giants Move Early
In June, Tencent launched a series of camps for students aged 13 to 18, offering mentorship and training in areas including AI product management, robotics, and quantum computing. ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming co-founded a nonprofit research center in October 2025 targeting students aged 16 to 18. The program selects 30 students each year as full-time research trainees in AI, mathematics, and computer science, while also hosting summer camps for a broader group of participants.
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Applicants are asked to submit school transcripts, describe their experience in math and computer science, and include a statement from their parents outlining how they have supported their child’s learning.
This early recruitment strategy is essentially a defensive maneuver against a labor market that is outpacing traditional education cycles. By locking in promising candidates before they enter the university system, firms secure loyalty and shape the technical worldview of their future engineers without the interference of standardized curricula. It transforms the concept of corporate training into a formative educational experience that starts years before employment legally begins.
“AI talent has become both scarce and unusually scalable,” Tianchen Xu, a Beijing-based senior economist at research firm Economist Intelligence Unit, said. “A younger engineer who has grown up with open-source models, coding agents, and fast experimentation may have lower adjustment costs and a longer expected runway inside the firm.”
Vocational Shifts
Some companies are moving beyond education programs and reshaping the path from school to employment. Chinese automotive group Geely launched a talent program in March this year, which recruits students immediately after high school and guarantees them training and a job at the company. Their pay matches that of university graduates.
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Participants receive company-designed training in AI, new energy vehicles, low-altitude aviation, and satellite technologies alongside their studies. Although students pay an annual tuition of 5,800 yuan ($800), the company says it is refunded after the successful completion of each academic year if they finish.
Supply and Demand
This push comes as China’s AI talent shortage has deepened. McKinsey estimates China could face a shortfall of 5 million AI workers by 2030, with universities and existing talent pipelines supplying only about a third of the demand. The shortage is already visible. Between January and May, Chinese employers advertised 3.08 AI vacancies per qualified candidate, according to recruitment platform Zhaopin. AI engineering positions grew 28.4% year over year.
Not everyone is convinced that high school is the right place to start hiring. For leading Chinese AI startup MiniMax, the shift is less about hiring younger people than about rethinking what talent looks like. The average employee age at the company is 29 years, with more than 73% working in research and development.
“AI is a very new industry,” Yunan Zhang, vice president of MiniMax, said. “Academic degrees are also not absolute standards; they’re only a reference. We want to look for a person’s raw intelligence.”
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That approach means younger candidates get opportunities they might not have had only a few years ago. In the U.S., technology companies like Google and Microsoft have long operated programs for high school students. According to the Burning Glass Institute, a non-profit research center, the share of Google job postings requiring a college degree fell from 93% in 2017 to 77% in 2022.
“Perhaps in the past, if you were only in your first or second year of university, you wouldn’t even have had the chance to get past HR at one of China’s top internet companies,” Zhang said. “Today, companies are open to that. It is not that we think younger is better. It’s that age is no longer a barrier.”
Actual hiring decisions are still largely made at the undergraduate or graduate level, despite the new programs. “The investment in high school students is really about building a long-term talent pool,” Chris Pei, co-founder of AI recruitment firm UFound, said. “Companies want a way to follow these students’ development over several years and see who eventually grows into the kind of person they want to hire.”
Yang recently considered pausing his son’s participation in public events and competitions so he could have more time to rest, play, and focus on schoolwork. “As parents, we feel conflicted,” he said. “We can see how passionate he is about building things with AI, but there are still so many things he needs to learn. After all, he’s still just a kid.”