Opinion | What Hong Kong can learn from Singapore on nurturing a tech ecosystem for IT talent

It’s as if someone has pulled the plug from Hong Kong’s IT talent pool. Even as local demand and average salaries for information technology expertise outpace that of many other sectors, the city is experiencing a brain drain that is expected to worsen.

After the pandemic and an exodus of young people to the United States, Britain, Canada and other countries, recruitment company Venturenix last year projected that an additional 100,000 IT professionals would be required to bridge the market gap within five years. Hong Kong produces only around 1,500 university graduates in software engineering-related fields every year.

This year, Venturenix projects that about 800,000 employees, or 25 per cent of Hong Kong’s workforce, will be affected as applications such as ChatGPT penetrate a wide range of industries. While most IT job postings now require only the ability to use ChatGPT and Midjourney, Venturenix director Dicky Yuen said he believed that soon, the ability to write code and connect a company’s data or work processes with AI tools will become as necessary as knowing how to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

According to Venturenix’s statistics, there are around 4,000 IT jobseekers every month but 7,400 positions to fill, resulting in roughly four out of 10 vacancies going unfilled. With the drive towards digital transformation affecting nearly every industry, not to mention the dire need to staff tech start-ups even as the government launches tech-related initiatives, such as the Hong Kong I&T Development Blueprint and new cryptocurrency regulations, that figure is poised to increase.

So, what can be done to address Hong Kong’s IT talent shortage? One solution proposed by the government is to enhance the Technology Talent Admission Scheme, to attract tech professionals. But it is worth considering if there are other ways to nurture local tech talent to address this long-term problem.