“Risks is not the right term, but there are some imponderables,” Mr. Conrad added. “If you look at the magnitude of the structural changes going on, it’s not always easy to predict the outcomes, including for employment.”

Data on China’s job market lack the frequency and general quality of figures in more developed markets. For example, the official urban unemployment rate, published quarterly, has ranged from 4 to 4.3 percent for the last decade, a level of stability that economists say is hard to achieve

Instead, shifts in the health of the job market tend to show up more clearly in wage and recruiting trends. Here, two overarching factors have emerged in recent years: The pool of migrant workers is tightening as the returns from urbanization diminish, while a shortage of white-collar jobs for new college graduates points to a skills mismatch.

“It is difficult to hire workers, even if the economy is not doing that well,” said Juble Lu, a manager at the Zhihua Kitchen Cabinet Accessories Factory in the southern city of Guangzhou.

Factories like Ms. Lu’s rely largely on China’s migrant work force of 175 million. But this pool of laborers is growing today at about only 1 percent a year, much slower than the broader economy. That tighter market tends to give bargaining power to workers and push up wages. For skilled workers, Ms. Lu said, wages could rise by as much as 20 percent a year. “Workers still have their many demands,” she said.

The tighter migrant labor pool is symptomatic of the broader growth slowdown. For more than a decade, China has been able to increase the size of its economy by several percentage points a year simply by people moving from farms to factories, where their productivity in economic terms soared. Today, that trend is slowing as the economic returns from urbanization become relatively smaller.