'Students' awareness of the importance of risk management has encouraged them to get better training to increase their competitiveness in the market.'

Professor Chang said some of the demand for the HKU programme came from mainland China students who wanted to get a degree from a reputable university as well as to gain some working experience in Hong Kong before moving back to the mainland.

Michael Wong Chak-sham, associate professor of economics and finance at City University (CityU), said traditional accounting and finance courses alone would not give practitioners enough training to value and develop these instruments.

Some of the newly developed financial products deal with a combination of derivatives, such as options and warrants, which derive their value from other underlying assets.

Many of these were difficult to value and price, Professor Wong said.

Lam Yat-fai, a part-time teaching fellow at CityU and an industry practitioner in risk management, said one of the difficulties with going back to school to get this knowledge was that it might take a long time before the academic research on an industry topic was completed.

'In my opinion there is always a time lag for an investment course to meet the requirement of the financial industry because it takes around six to eight years for academics to develop a structured textbook on an emerging topic,' Mr Lam said.

Master of finance degrees offered by local universities are usually part-time programmes that can be completed in two to four years. Some programmes include coursework that help students prepare for industry qualification examinations, such as the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.

There has been strong demand for these degrees in recent years, so universities are offering more tailored programmes for those seeking to specialise in different areas.

CityU, for example, offers separate master's degrees in finance, banking and financial engineering. Banking focuses more on credit-related products and risk management, while financial engineering places emphasis on information technology and quantitative analysis.

Aside from academic training, there are industry certifications that help professionals boost their credentials.

One of the more popular designations is the Chartered Financial Analyst. The United States-based CFA Institute, which awards the designation, started administering the examinations in Hong Kong in the early 1980s.

The number of CFA charter holders in Hong Kong has grown to 3,977 this year, from 660 nine years ago.

Jan Squires, managing director of the Asia-Pacific operations of the CFA Institute, attributed the growth to the development of the financial markets in the region and the expansion of western corporations in Asia, which brought the awareness and demand of the CFA designation to the region.

Among the various changes in the financial sector in recent years, Mr Squires said the most notable were the growth of private wealth management and alternative asset classes, such as hedge funds, private equity and Islamic finance products.

'The opportunities that all of these trends are creating are almost limitless, especially for a person who is well-trained, has a global outlook and is willing to keep learning,' Mr Squires said.

'The challenge is there's always more to know and there's always more knowledge and skills to keep up. The stakes are higher and the risks are greater.'

Aside from analysis of the financial aspects of a company, Mr Squires said that non-financial performance measures such as corporate governance, and the environmental and social behaviour of companies were increasingly becoming more important.

Angeline Chin Lai-kuen, chief executive of the Institute of Financial Planners of Hong Kong, said with the growth of private wealth management, retail bankers now needed more breadth of product knowledge to sell other products such as insurance and estate planning services.

Ms Chin said during an economic downturn one of the more popular workshops that private bankers had been signing up for were those on behavioural finance.

'That's pretty hot right now,' she said. 'You need to know the psychology of your clients to know how to deal with them. We encourage financial planners to talk to their clients more during this climate.'