Talent is the key to industrial development. Shandong has made great efforts to build a base for cultivating skilled-based talents, and worked hard on discipline setting and talent training mode to quickly and accurately provide highly-skilled talents for industrial transformation and upgrading.

To develop disciplines based on the industrial chain, Shandong has set up 23 provincial-level industry steering committees, and established and improved the "negative list" of professional settings and early warning exit mechanism, focusing on the replacement of old growth drivers with new ones in major projects and regional industrial upgrading. It has pooled all resources into building characteristic discipline clusters required for industrial development. According to statistics, 84 vocational colleges in the province established 200 new disciplines and abolished 211 old ones last year alone.

At present, Shandong's vocational colleges have set up a total of 390 disciplines around the "top ten" industries, with more than 600,000 students enrolled, accounting for about 74% of the total number of students. The disciplinary structure is basically in line with the industrial structure. It has promoted the construction of factories on campus and the relocation of classes to workshops. More than 12,000 enterprises are involved in Shandong, covering more than ten industries (cluster) such as processing and manufacturing, rail transit, modern logistics, and cross-border e-commerce. Last year, the output value of productive training bases alone reached 2.413 billion yuan. High-standard vocational education has provided strong talent and technical support for Shandong's industrial upgrading and transformation.