Around 33,400 new jobs were created in the urban areas of North China's Inner Mongolia autonomous region in the first quarter of 2020, completing 15.2 percent of the autonomous region's annual target, local officials said. 

The urban registered unemployment rate during Q1 was 3.73 percent, which was 0.77 percentage points below the annual target.

That’s according to information released by Inner Mongolia's Human Resources and Social Security Department.

In response to the impact of the novel coronavirus epidemic, Inner Mongolia’s human resources department has carried out a number of initiativess, such as implementing a Graduate Employment and Entrepreneurship Promotion Plan and a Grassroots Growth Plan.

Officials said it also organized a series of online vocational skills training activities targeted at company employees and unemployed people.

As of April 23, a total of 157 vocational skills online training platforms had been released to the public, with 33,900 people studying free vocational courses.

To encourage businesses not to lay off employees -- or to reduce their layoffs -- the government is implementing exemptions, reductions and deferral policies on pension, unemployment and work-related injuries social insurance premiums paid by enterprises for their employees, from February to June.

As of April 24, the Inner Mongolia government had reduced or exempted social insurance premiums to the tune of 2.3 billion yuan ($326.20 million) for local enterprises.

In addition, to provide matchmaking services for employers and job seekers, Inner Mongolia has held 10 categories of online job fairs since March 20.

A total of 542,000 positions were made available at 203 job fairs, with 760,000 people reaching preliminary employment offers.