Hong Kong workers feel they are not equipped with the right skills for digital economy: survey
Workers say that they are not receiving adequate training in digital skills required for the digital economy
More than half of Hong Kong’s workforce believe that their jobs are under threat from the rapid growth of the digital economy, while over 40 per cent feel that they do not have the right skills to compete in it, a survey has found.
The survey was conducted by tech consultants IDC for Workday, a major provider of enterprise cloud applications for finance and human resources, and it polled over 1,400 employees from eight Asia-Pacific countries to assess their attitudes towards the digital economy.
David Hope, president of Workday Asia-Pacific, said that manual jobs were the most at risk from digitalisation, such as sorting through job applicants’ CVs in the initial stages of the hiring process, and call centre operators.
“We hear all this terminology about how AI will impact the industry, but it will take time,” said Hope. “Transformation takes time because there is so much foundation work that needs to be done.”
The poll also showed that Hong Kong employees were the third unhappiest in the Asia-Pacific region after South Korea and Japan, with 23 per cent saying they were unsatisfied with their job.
A quarter of local respondents said they planned to leave their current employer within a year, with the biggest factors being wages, work-life balance and a lack of career prospects because of digitalisation. Thirty per cent of Hong Kong workers also said they were not getting adequate training in digital skills.