Abstract: With the increasing competition in the talent market， the employment of college students from poor families has become more serious. Using scale development technology， this study attempts to explore the structure and content of these needy students employment competence and identify their differences in terms of gender and major. A specific scale is developed by combining college students employment competence scale and interviews. Adopting such software as SPSS 21.0 and AMOS 21.0， this study uses factor analysis to explore and examine the structure and content of employment competence of college students from poor families. The results show that employment competence of college students from poor families consists of five dimensions—personality， professional ability， occupational adjustment， general skill and self-control. Furthermore， there exist significant differences in the understanding of personality among students of different genders and in the understanding of general skill among students from varied majors.

Key words: student from a poor family, employment competency, employment competency scale