Courses run by Hong Kong’s Employees Retraining Board fail to meet target employment rate, Audit Commission finds

Courses run by Hong Kong’s Employees Retraining Board to help workers find jobs have failed to meet the target employment rate, the audit watchdog has found, while also revealing that the board’s seed fund has run into an average yearly deficit of HK$296 million (US$38 million) in recent years.

The board, a statutory body that provides training on skills such as cooking and housekeeping, has set placement targets of about 50 to 70 per cent for people who graduate from its courses.

But the Audit Commission found that between 2014 and 2019, about 73 per cent of the courses had failed to meet a desired target employment rate of 60 per cent.

But courses for the ethnic minorities, rehabilitated ex-offenders and new immigrants – with a target employment rate of just 50 per cent – did much better. Only 26.3 per cent of the courses could not meet their target.

“[The board] should continue to monitor the performance of training courses on various [key performance parameters] and relevant indicators,” the watchdog recommended.

It added that the board needed to review the allowances for the placement-tied courses, as no review had been conducted for a decade. The allowances now range between HK$30 and HK$153.8 per day.