The Continuing Education Fund continues to add new eligible courses in response to changing market needs and student and course provider demands.
Last year, 785 new reimbursable courses were approved. 'As of December 2006, we have around 5,400 courses in the list of reimbursable courses,' said Brian Ha Kwok-fung, Education and Manpower Bureau assistant secretary (manpower infrastructure).
'We anticipate that course providers will continue to submit new programmes in 2007, offering an even wider range of courses for CEF applicants,' he added.
Course providers make their own decisions to register courses under CEF in the eight specified sectors and skill domains.
Of the courses added, 42 per cent covered business services. Financial services also received a good boost, with 121 new courses, or about 15 per cent. There was also demand for courses at the opposite end of the spectrum from business and finance - 91 creative services programmes and 75 design programmes were approved as reimbursable.
A total of 63 new language courses were included on the approved list - 36 of them English, 12 Putonghua, 11 Japanese and two French. Tourism accounted for 53 new courses, with other sectors being logistics, and interpersonal and intrapersonal skills for the workplace.