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Hong Kong graduates will enter anaemic job market this year, statistics suggest

  • According to data from a major employment platform, only about 12,500 jobs for graduates were listed between January and March this year
  • The figure represents a slight increase from 2020, but is still nowhere near the pre-pandemic norm – the same period in 2019 saw around 20,300 job openings

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Young people attend a jobs fair in Quarry Bay last month. Photo: Felix Wong
Chan Ho-him
Hong Kong’s class of 2021 will graduate this summer amid a relatively bleak job market under the economic downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, latest statistics show, with analysts and insiders predicting the trend will not improve until next year.
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According to data obtained by the Post from a major employment platform, only about 12,500 jobs for graduates were listed between January and March this year, a slight increase of 2.5 per cent compared to the same period in 2020, but still nowhere near the pre-pandemic norm. In the same period in 2019, the number of job openings was around 20,300.

Meanwhile, nearly 30,000 young people graduated from Hong Kong’s eight publicly funded universities each year.

The figures from the Joint Institution Job Information System – a portal run by those universities – also show there have been fewer of the highly coveted management trainee positions available for graduates so far this year, down to just 1,000 from around 1,200 last year.

“We had initially expected the job market to show some improvements this year, but it seems that the situation so far had been more or less similar to last year,” said Edmond So Wai-chung, general manager of a locally based human resources consultancy.

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