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In mid-July, I was sitting on a crowded tourist bus driving out of the Shenzhen Bay Port to a quarantine hotel. I don’t know if it’s because the air conditioner is not turned on enough so that the air is a little stuffy, and my mood is also a little dull, and I don’t have the excitement of going home at all. In fact, I really want to, and the reason is very clear, because my attempt to find a job in Hong Kong failed.
This article may be a little different from other lessons learned, because I am reviewing and thinking about the lessons learned along the way from the perspective of a loser. In order to make my attempts worthwhile and after thinking twice, I decided to write this article, hoping to help friends who are willing to work in Hong Kong.
The feelings and experiences of this article are summed up based on my own personal experiences and those of my friends and classmates. Due to the limited experience and social circle, the content presented in this article will inevitably not cover all situations in real life. If you have friends who are willing to share your experience or ideas, you are also welcome to leave your voice and discuss together.
Respondents turn negative on Hong Kong’s employment prospects in 2021 ( source )
Professional choice
I think success in finding a job consists of two measures:
- Can you find the job you want?
- The job found does not meet expectations in terms of salary, industry prospects, and personal development space.
I believe in the power of subjective initiative, but a person’s success, in addition to personal struggle, also needs to consider other objective factors. I don’t think job hunting starts when you send in your resume, or even when you prepare it. To a large extent, a person’s career is gradually determined when he chooses his major and when he chooses the content of study, even whether there is a direct connection between the final job and the content of study.
If the major you study can better match the local market environment and the needs of the general background at that time, then finding a job will indeed be more effective with less effort. As an entrepot trade port dominated by an export-oriented economy, if you want to stay in Hong Kong to work, then those majors that are related to the word “money”: finance, economics, statistics, accounting, data analysis, etc., will undoubtedly be more difficult to find a job. There are advantages.
In recent years, with the promotion of the concept of “Innovation and Technology” by the Hong Kong government, it has become easier for some computer science-related majors to find jobs. According to one of my classmates who is a programmer in Hong Kong, compared with the mainland, especially in the outbreak period from 2018 to 2021, the advantages of Hong Kong’s technical positions compared with the mainland’s large factories are not obvious, but they are not as good as the mainland. “liver”.
The trend of average monthly salary in various industries in the past two years ( source )
As for social science majors, I will take the media major I read as an example to briefly explain. Media majors (including communication, journalism, new media, and advertising) are also relatively easy to find jobs, because some traditional media companies in Hong Kong have been in a state of unsatisfactory recruitment for a long time. The media industry is a salary depression in Hong Kong. The monthly salary of newcomers in the first year basically fluctuates in the range of 13k to 16k. Therefore, the turnover of personnel in the media industry is also relatively frequent. For comparison, the cashiers and dishwashing workers recruited by the tea restaurant earn between 17k and 18k per month. Considering that each fast-food meal in Hong Kong costs 40 to 50 Hong Kong dollars, the bus fare for a trip to Victoria Harbour costs 10 yuan, and the rent for a 200-square-foot (about 20 square meter) house in the urban area is often tens of thousands of dollars. You can probably imagine that the media Are the wages in the industry reasonable?
Although some people may say that the development space of cashiers and journalists cannot be generalized, the starting salary of an industry reflects the importance and respect of the society to the industry. If you can’t keep new people, how can you inject fresh blood into the industry and let it continue to grow and develop? After all, not everyone has the patience to spend five or ten years slowly climbing up. If the current salary does not make people feel that their efforts are paying off, employees will inevitably become discouraged and unwilling. So much so that a journalism teacher in our college said to us, “Those who can persevere in journalism in Hong Kong are generally richer at home.”
during study
The postgraduate teaching time in Hong Kong is generally from September of the first year to June of the second year, and economics majors start classes in mid-August. In these eleven months, if you want to seamlessly transition into professional life as soon as possible after completing your studies, then I think there are several aspects to try.
School Resources
Basically every school will have an agency responsible for helping students find employment. At the opening ceremony, the relevant teachers in charge will give a brief introduction. Taking CUHK as an example, this institution will forward the recruitment information of related companies to students’ mailboxes every day. In addition, the Career Counseling Center will also invite outstanding graduates to come back to school to hold employment experience lectures and workshops. Students can also make appointments with counselors for resumes. polish, or conduct a mock interview to teach interview skills.
The college will also have some internship recommendation programs. Different colleges will cooperate with some companies. Students only need to apply and pass the screening at the college level to enter the company for internship. The college I study in will recommend short-term internship programs every semester. Employers include companies with mainland backgrounds such as Phoenix Satellite TV and China Daily, as well as local companies such as Ming Pao Group. Of course, this kind of internship also has disadvantages: because it cannot conflict with the curriculum, it can only be practiced in summer and winter vacations, so the internship period is generally not long, and the internship subsidy is not high. But for students who want to increase the richness of their resumes, this is also an opportunity worth noting.
Sorry for holding back alumni ( source )
prepare resume
When the semester is not over, academics may be more stressful, and there is not much time for interviews at this time. But I think it’s time to start preparing resumes. Regarding how to write a job-hunting resume, from the content and layout design , I have sent many teachers to provide detailed resume writing instructions, which will not be repeated here. Based on my own experience, I would like to propose two points that students who want to stay in Hong Kong need to pay attention to when preparing their resumes.
- Hong Kong is a biliterate and trilingual multicultural region. Therefore, in addition to preparing a resume in Simplified Chinese, it is best to prepare a resume in Traditional Chinese and English. Affected by cultural differences, the descriptions of job content and nature of work in Hong Kong and the mainland are not exactly the same, so it is best not to rely on translation software to write bilingually. We can browse and summarize similar descriptions on job-hunting websites, which will accumulate over time. Start the corpus.
- Job seekers with complex backgrounds, it is best to prepare corresponding resumes according to the direction of the post. Job seekers should highlight the characteristics of their resume that are consistent with the job they are applying for in the concise content as possible, and can omit those unrelated to the nature of the job. For example, as a journalism student with a product operation background, if you need to post an operation position, you need to emphasize the background related to product operation practice, while the information related to journalism should be simplified as much as possible, and vice versa. What I do is, for those work experiences that are not directly related to the application information, I will try to highlight the more applicable skills that it can show: coordination ability, data analysis ability, writing ability, etc., so that even if it is looking at Internships that seem less relevant are not entirely useless.
As mentioned above, different resumes should be prepared according to different positions. Each resume should be prepared in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and English versions. As time goes by, the content of resumes may need to be continuously supplemented and updated… So prepare resumes in advance. Still necessary.
job site
Combined with self-media recommendations and observation of the successful cases of students around you, you can mainly focus on a few websites, which are also the websites that Hong Kong people use more.
JobsDB : It is very convenient to use, with very detailed job classification, and you can also see the (received/read/rejected) status after the resume is delivered.
JobsDB
Linkedin : A well-known website worldwide. Job seekers follow the tips above to complete their resume, and then work hard to broaden their network, which will also help in finding a job. Many companies will recruit on Linkedin, and if they are good enough, there will also be headhunters looking for door-to-door sales.
LinkedIn
jijis : This is a website mainly for students looking for internships and full-time jobs. Students from eight universities in Hong Kong can register and select jobs according to their majors or other screening items.
jijis
Hong Kong Labour Department Mutual Aid Employment Service : This is an employment mutual aid website established by the Hong Kong government to meet the needs of employers and employees. In addition to searching for vacancies based on job types and industries, it also has specific job search portals for specific groups of people, such as highly educated people and elderly people. , Youth in the Greater Bay Area, etc.
In addition, there are also some public accounts in China that will release some recruitment information for positions in Hong Kong, you can also pay more attention.
course selection
Course selection at the beginning of each semester is also an important factor affecting employment. Combined with employment expectations, I think there are two dimensions to consider:
- The relevance of what you have learned to your future career direction;
- The timing of the selected course.
Taking the communication major I studied as an example, there are four compulsory courses and four elective courses in two semesters. Compulsory courses pay more attention to the theoretical research and thinking framework construction of communication and the Internet. If you want to have a better understanding of the future workplace, or want to acquire more specific skills, you need to pay more attention to course selection.
When job seekers need to apply for certain positions in the Mainland or Hong Kong, they may require certain skills (for example, some non-technical positions may also need to master Python or SQL). My major can choose journalism elective courses (Chinese news writing, feature writing, news video production), public relations courses, marketing courses or data automation courses, etc. Depending on the future work direction, you can choose different elective courses. If you’ve already acquired some of the more in-demand skills (even if you’re only scratching the surface), you’ll have a better degree of competition. Therefore, students can choose elective courses according to their future employment direction.
Screenshots of some course listings
If you want to be more “rolled” and find an internship to gain work experience before looking for a full-time job, you also need to pay attention to the time of the course when choosing courses, and try to spare two to three working days as complete as possible, then only There is relatively sufficient time for internships. For the convenience of students who have jobs, some schools will offer courses from 6:30 to 9:00, or you can choose courses in this time period. If the free time is too fragmented, it is more difficult to get internship opportunities.
end of class
At this stage you have more time to prepare for the job search. If the job you were looking for can have the opportunity to become a regular, and you are satisfied with the content and treatment of the job, then it will be better. But if you want to start preparing for full-time work from this point in time, take a look at the suggestions mentioned below.
After the class is over, the time that can be arranged gradually increases, and the frequency of resume delivery can be gradually increased at this time. When I first applied, I was only interested in a few companies, so I just delivered to those companies. So when the few resumes I submitted were marked as “Not suitable”, it was inevitable to feel lost and anxious.
In fact, as far as the job search experience of my classmates and I is concerned, there are very few delivery experiences that can be hit with one click. Successful offers are often followed by a marathon “search for jobs – delivery – failure – re-search – re-delivery”. the process of. The more resumes you submit, the more likely you will be hit by an offer. But I’m not saying that job seekers often need to give up their dream “company”. We might as well take interviews with other companies as a way to polish our interview skills and review our past experiences. Constant training is to meet at a better time.
All grades for the academic year will come out half a month to a month after the last assignment of the last course is submitted. At this time, you can start preparing to apply for the IANG visa. IANG, the full name of Immigration Arrangements for Non-local Graduates (non-local graduates staying in Hong Kong/returning to Hong Kong for employment), is a visa that non-Hong Kong local students must obtain to work in Hong Kong in a legal capacity. But before applying for a pre-visa, we need to prepare two things in advance, which is still time-consuming.
- Find a school to issue a Certifying Letter to certify that the student has completed their studies and state the expected time of graduation. Generally speaking, you need to complete a degree certificate to apply for an IANG visa, but this letter can also be issued by the school instead. Otherwise, you will not be able to apply for a visa until the graduation certificate is issued in mid-November.
- The IANG visa needs to have the signature of the person in the unit where the file is located. If you are going to study in Hong Kong from the mainland, we need to confirm the location of our file, and then print the relevant pages in the IANG visa application document, and let the family find the relevant personnel of the unit to sign and send it to Hong Kong. (If you don’t know where your files are, you can directly enter your ID number and name on the xx local treasure to query)
Taking CUHK as an example, the entrance to the application certificate ( source ) 
Page 8 of the Employment Application Form for Professionals in Hong Kong (ID990A)
From my personal experience, it takes three weeks from submitting the application letter online to getting the application letter, and one week from finding my file to my family sending the relevant documents to Hong Kong. If you want to submit your visa application as soon as possible, you should prepare as soon as possible.
A bit of chicken soup that may be out of place
The above is a summary of my experience with my friends and then shared with you. Among them, there are successful experiences and failures. Although the title is aimed at students who want to work in Hong Kong, plan ahead and calculate the time difference to coordinate the study-internship-work time, so that there will not be too much time gap. , I believe that whether it is in the Mainland, Hong Kong and Macau, or abroad to find a job, there is a certain reference.
But, in fact, I am also thinking, does life really have to be full of arrangements? I still remember that I joined the job immediately after graduating from my undergraduate degree. I missed the opportunity of graduation trip. I always thought that as long as I stayed for half a year and a year, there would always be a chance to make up. But until now, three years later, I have never had the chance to take a carefree trip for a relatively long period of time. A career requires step-by-step thinking and prudent action plans to keep running forward, but this often means giving up the beautiful scenery passing by the roadside. It’s impossible for people to go smoothly. If it were you, would you be brave enough to make a decision that you won’t regret?
I would like to share with you a sentence I saw on the Internet:
“Do it, you will regret it anyway.”
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