He graduated from the department of metallurgy of National Tangshan Engineering College, now Southwest Jiaotong University in July 1945, and obtained a doctorate of foundry engineering from University of Birmingham in UK in 1951. In June 1953, Yao earned a Diploma in Metallurgy from the Royal School of Mines, Imperial College London. At the invitation of Eugen Piwowarsky from the RWTH Aachen University, he moved to West Germany in early 1954 and worked at Aachen as a research assistant at what was then the Institute for Ferrous Metallurgy.