Urumqi Vocational University (UVU) is the only comprehensive, full-time higher vocational college in Urumqi city, which was founded in 1985. UVU, a merger of the former Urumqi Vocational University and Urumqi Municipal Continuing Education Institute, was approved by the government of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in 2007. UVU is both a city and district joint-development, with city being the priority administration system.

Five university campuses cover 1325mu (about 218 acres). The total assets of UVU have reached to 700,000,000 Yuan. It has 223 on-campus laboratories and training rooms and 214 off-campus training bases, and its experimental learning equipment costs total 93,830,000 Yuan. There are more than 950,000 volumes of books stored in the school. Currently, there are 15,000 full-time students studying a variety of majors. The University consists of 16 different teaching units including the Trade and Economy College, a Chinese-foreign co-operative institution. 726 staff members are in service, among them are 142 with associate senior professional title, more than 90% of the full-time professional teachers are“dual-skilled teachers” (qualified both for teaching and working on the front lines of their field). The University has 5 Autonomous Region level teaching teams. The University caters 69 specialties (majors), 5 of them are under National Backbone Higher Vocational College key construction, 4 of them are key established majors which supported by the Central Finance Bureau, 2 are Central Finance Bureau supported service industry majors, 2 are Central Finance Bureau supported public training centers, 4 are key majors of demonstrative colleges in Autonomous Region, and 10 are characteristic specialties of the Autonomous Region.

Since the establishment of UVU, it maintains its development on the basis of “social service, employment-orientation, and a combination of industry-university-research.” It adheres to the main ideas of “market-orientation, matching industry trends, service in the local community, and the demonstration of outstanding characteristics,” and it vigorously implements the strategy of “ run a school with quality, strengthen it with research, prosper it with talent, develop it with specialties, and create a new, reputable brand.” After years of development, the University formed an educational pattern with higher vocational education as its primary component and with vocational education, teacher training, and adult education as its secondary components. At present, the school has become one of the National Demonstrative Hundred-backbone Higher Vocational Colleges, Autonomous Region’s demonstrative higher vocational colleges,  Autonomous Region’s (vocational) college student employment entrepreneurship training bases (hatch), and the head unit of Autonomous Region’s third industry (modern service industry), which is located in the vocational education park. As the leading higher vocational college of the Urumqi vocational education group, UVU is acclaimed to be one the Autonomous Region’s best civilized units and one of the Autonomous Region’s most outstanding units of supervision over college students' ideological and political work.

UVU’s “thirteen-five” goal is “promoting integration of industry-college, cooperation between colleges and education bases “four centers, eight bases, ten platforms ” innovation and service systems; improving the teaching quality comprehensively, applying to become an Applied Technology University, and turning the school into a distinctive and zone-leading, first-class, the western-leading, central Asia-oriented brand vocational college.” To this end, the school will actively be serving local economic and social development, supporting local industry layout adjustment, further strengthening UVU’s core-value construction, and making efforts to promote the development of the school to a new level.