Recovery Expected in Global Economy
Moving Ahead with Enhanced Competitiveness

Last year, investors' con?dence was dampened by economic slowdown and political crises in certain regions. But positive signs indicating revival have appeared at the start of 2018. So how should executives equip themselves in preparation for possible career advancement? We have interviewed two sectoral representatives on the economic outlook for the coming year and their views on continuous learning.

Having been in Hong Kong f or more than a century, Bank of China（Hong Kong）Limited is an important brand and pillar in the local financial market. Its subsidiary BOC Life is one of the biggest insurance companies in Hong Kong. In face of a booming insurance industry, BOC Life is leveraging its all-rounded human resources policies and support services to attract and nurture talents. With its parent company's support for China's One Belt One Road initiative, BOC Life is well positioned to offer staff cross department and function development opportunities as a means to retain talents.

Talents Needed for Fintech
BOC Life is positive about the prospects for the financial and banking sectors in Hong Kong this year, with plans to increase its headcounts in support of business growth. According to Darryl Sing, Head of Learning and Development, there remains a big demand for talents in the financial, banking and insurance sectors. The growth of Fintech and Insurtech will further fuel the demand for digital talents.

"Even in a competitive market with a low unemployment rate, there will be still expansion in headcounts in the finance, banking-related sectors in 2018."

Darryl said that BOC Life has kept expanding its number of frontline and backstage staff in support of its strategy of sales through different channels. This year it is expecting about 10% increase in its current establishment of 350, especially in sales support positions. Apart from back office staff , it will also need a large increase in sales personnel.

Possessing hard knowledge and soft skills
Darryl suggests that people aspiring career advancement should broaden their horizon by not just enhancing professional knowledge, related to their job but also learn more, about digitization, such as Fintech, big data analytics, cloud applications, etc. They should acquire both 'hard knowledge' and knowledge on staff management, decision-making, communication skills, empathy, etc.

Stiff competition among e-platforms
Celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, Peoplebank is an Australia-based international Human Resource Solution company with branches in Hong Kong & Singapore. It specializes in recruiting IT professionals, Talent Management Outsourcing including temporary staff recruitment and staff secondment services . They work with clients across government, banking, insurance and technology companies. The company now has around 1,100 outsourced staff .

Astor Sin, Divisional Director at Peoplebank, mentioned public and private organizations are more willing to invest on Information Technology to build their own digital platform, thus leading to a higher demand of talents. She expects there will be a 2% to 3% growth on IT jobs in 2018. The trend of developing"ABCDE", i.e. AI, Big Data, Cloud, Digital and Electronic Service, will continue to grow and create many jobs.


Importance of Communication Skills
There is a lack of supply in Information Security professionals in Hong Kong, due to the rapid growth of e-platforms such as online banking and e-payment platform. We also recommend our clients to offer training to employees with good potential, to take up different roles. Soft skills are also very important for IT professionals, as crossteam collaborations, training and presentations are fundamental, especially for those in senior positions. Nowadays, even non-IT professionals are taking technology course, because everything is going digital."

"Going forward, Peoplebank will continue to expand our talent pool."Astor Sin said, we will go one step further to become true partners of our customers. We want to help with enhancing their talent solution plan, such as advising them on the current market and future technology trends, so they can plan ahead in terms of talent pipelining. We will also alert them on the talent supply in specific job functions.

Excellent program with excellent people In many regions of China, there are many candidates that wish to be promoted into the management level would like to study MBA, this is actually the result best demonstrated after a rapid development of various businesses in Mainland China. This opportunity makes many enterprises require a substantial number of management talent. Holding an internationallyacclaimed MBA course qualification is indeed a big advantage. Currently there are many big enterprises, having stabilized in Mainland China, have decided to enter into the international market. During the process of this development, the enterprises need a large number of management level employees who have the experience of dealing in Mainland China and have the knowledge of how the international operation of business world work in order to assist further development of the enterprise.

Studying the acclaimed MBA courses for many students coming from the Mainland who would like to try out their potential in Hong Kong is very attractive. In 2017, the MBA course in University of Hong Kong has again ranked as number two in the MBA courses worldwide in the Economist. The criteria for this ranking is very comprehensive. They include the opportunities to expand one's business, the individual candidate's own personal development and their own education experience, salary increase and socializing network development. In this survey, the universities in regions of Hong Kong has performed very well. Except for the HKU, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has respectively ranked number 97th. Therefore, Hong Kong MBA courses do have a more prominent advantage when compared to other regions in Asia.

Obviously, the quality of Hong Kong's MBA courses are more guaranteed when compared to the fl uctuating quality of the MBA or EMBA courses in Mainland China. It is chiefl y due to Hong Kong's years of records of success, its better quality control, as well as its internationalized teaching quality that has made a lot of mainland employees willing to come to Hong Kong to study in order to have a better development in their career. Amongst many employees from Mainland who come to Hong Kong, many of them are already in the position of being middle/high-ranking management level, and usually come from the professions which needs to be connected with international standards such as finance or accounting. These management talents understands fully that they need to be equipped with knowledge of business operation and administration despite the mainland enterprise development. A series of MBA courses, provided by an international city of Hong Kong, can suffi ciently provide them with these necessary knowledge, and hence has become the staircase for those mainland talent to international standards.

Wide network and wide vision
In addition of being properly monitored, Hong Kong's MBA curriculum also undertakes both theory and practice to its students which provides them with ample opportunities to gain vital experience from this international city. This is the undoubted advantage Hong Kong MBA course can offer and is not something that mainland Universities could always provide students with. The school's highly-valued interaction among the programme team, alumni and students that make MBA more conducive to knowledge and experience exchange. With English as a medium in teaching plus its well-equipped facilities, Hong Kong's MBAs are sure to be able to bring its students to the next level of improving themselves. The university also enhances the career development services covering career counselling and coaching as well as job placement which are tailor-made to fi t the career goals, aspirations and directions of diff erent students. And, of course, In addition to the alumni-students buddy programme that connects students with seasoned graduates and the regional alumni chapters to foster their networks.

Most important, these hands-on experience could also be acquired in Hong Kong which is in close proximity to China. For many mainland students, those experience comes more practical than those that they could have learnt in many other famous universities overseas. This is because for most of those mainland students, it is most likely that they would work in China. Since the business context in China is very different from those of Western countries, Hong Kong serves as a perfect midpoint for mainland students to acquire universal and practical experience. Hong Kong MBA courses not only are readily proximate, but also satisfy the market demands; therefore are definitely their first choice.