Where to find the best technology school? Come to Shandong in China and look for “Lanxiang”.
This is almost a familiar slogan for Chinese born in the 1980s and 1990s. It seems that those who have not heard this phrase would say their childhood is incomplete.
Lanxiang Vocational School is a vocational and technical college established in 1984. It offers courses in engineering machinery, as well as beauty and hairdressing, and culinary courses. However, the most memorable aspect is excavator technology. The school trains at least 1,000 excavator operators every year, along with courses in excavator maintenance, as well as a series of engineering courses on bulldozers, cranes, and more. In 2019, they spent over $10 million to purchase 1,000 Sany excavators for student use.
In the excavator school at this institution, there are crash courses lasting 1-3 months, with tuition ranging from a few hundred to over $1,000. With assembly-line courses, the bosses make a lot of money. During the short training period, students can learn basic operations of mainstream brands, but later on, they may need to find a mentor on a construction site to gain practical experience.
Apart from its nationwide student body, the school is also well-known for spending over $3 million on advertising annually. The widely recognized slogan is known to every household in China.
Today, there are still many excavator schools in China. Graduates mainly pursue four directions: excavator operators, excavator maintenance technicians, excavator construction bosses, and excavator traders.
In China, when people can’t find a direction, they often turn to learning about excavators because they believe ‘there’s no place an excavator can’t go, and if there’s no road, they’ll pave one for themselves.’
In contrast, in Japan, a major excavator manufacturing country, the first specialized excavator technology vocational school was officially established in April 2022. The school will initially enroll 80 students for a one-year course.”