Monitor
WE IN THE media profession are not immune from anxieties about the job market. When we hear good news on the job frontier, we tend to pay attention, even at the risk of falling into the trap of 'feel good' journalism.
Consider Griffith William Jones, age 45, Princeton, class of 1980, who was until a week ago one of the 250,000 unemployed in Hong Kong. Last week, after 16 months of looking, Mr Jones finally found a very good job handling digital media and telecommunications for IBM Innovation Services.
A few days ago, we had a debate over whether the process was Ulyssean, for the Greek adventurer, or Homeric, for the entire epic (the Iliad for those of you who skipped Latin and Greek).
Painful might be the most accurate description. Griff Jones is a template for the global manager of the future, multilingual, a multitasker. His resume includes stints as a union organiser, logistics manager and chief information officer.
He is good at what he calls 'multipolar functions', such as building teams across linguistic and national barriers. He is fluent in Putonghua, or Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, French, and German, and reasonably glib in Cantonese - enough so to flirt with waitresses at the Financial Services Association, a raucous eatery in Manning House on Queen's Road.
'I'm a quick learner,' Mr Jones said. 'I keep jumping into situations where you have to learn in a hurry. What motivates me is the desire to understand the world, to get a sense of what's happening in all industries, to see how deep I can go into any given one.'
He loves Hong Kong. 'It's the gateway to China. People pooh-pooh that and Hong Kong will have to make an adjustment, but it's an incredible place, both the most cosmopolitan and the most traditional of Chinese societies. The contrasts are extreme and that's what I like about it.'
Nonetheless, Mr Jones had a hard time, very hard. When he was laid off by Philips Electronics in March last year, he moved from expat heaven - a HK$40,000 per month, 1,800 square foot flat in Bamboo Grove - to a HK$6,000 a month, sixth-floor walk-up in Wan Chai.
To help position himself for his job hunt, he spent US$70,000 for a master's programme in business administration under the joint programme run by Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The money came from his severance payment from Philips. He networked, tried leads, relentlessly exploited the Kellogg connection and ate vegetarian. Luckily, he does not drink or smoke.
Hong Kong was once such a job cornucopia that it gave rise to such expressions as FILTH (failed in London, try Hong Kong) for the endless stream of young Commonwealth job hopefuls.
Now, with unemployment hovering at 7.4 per cent, Hong Kong is worse off than sick-man-of-Asia Japan (5.4 per cent) or the recessionary United States (5.8 per cent).
Among the major world economies, only the European Union, with its legendary structural unemployment, at present tops Hong Kong by a few percentage points.
Mr Jones is every bit the global warrior when he summarises his last job at Philips, running a negotiating team in a billion-dollar acquisition.
'I hired five people and told them, this is not a permanent job by nature,' he said.
'We need to look at this work like samurai of the Tokugawa period. Their ideal was to wake up each morning and to say, today is a good day to die. Our objective is to do the best we can and get as much out of it as we can.'
In this market, that is good advice even if we have a job.
