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SCMP Reporter

RETRAINING will be a key to ensuring Hong Kong's unemployed people find jobs, according to Acting Education and Manpower Secretary Matthew Cheung Kin-chung.

 'We should invest more heavily in providing a structured retraining programme,' he said.

 Government measures announced last month will strengthen the job-matching and retraining programmes and create a 'one-stop shop' at the Employees Retraining Board (ERB) for companies seeking staff.

 The ERB budget has been increased a third, to about $301 million for this year, and a new nine-month programme is being introduced to train 1,000 people in language, computing and interpersonal skills.

 The programme of tailor-made training - in which the ERB develops training courses to meet the specific needs of local companies - will be expanded and the job-matching programme is to be developed by working with 400 trade associations to identify where jobs are.

 This year, 73,000 people are expected to attend.

 But, as up to 10,000 people took application forms for the 1,000 places on the programme, many critics feel the changes do not go far enough.

 Trade unionists said the schemes did not give enough people enough training or work hard enough to introduce technical skills.

 'We are urging that the Government put in place more retraining programmes,' The Frontier's Lee Cheuk-yan said. 'The skills that we lack in the general workforce are computing and language skills.'  ERB executive director Sam Chow Tung-shan said longer and more technical courses were not the answer, when trainees could only be paid $4,000 a month while attending.

 'Time is an extremely expensive cost consideration,' he said. 'We don't have unemployment benefit. One extra month [in training] means the whole family has to survive on just $4,000 for one extra month.'  Mr Chow said the two to four-week courses, giving basic service and interpersonal skills, had been effective in finding jobs for 77 per cent of the 55,000 people that underwent retraining in the last year.

 He said he doubted whether it would be effective to attempt to give advanced office skills to manual workers.

 'Not every factory worker can be a clerk.' 



Skills vital for unemployed