Following is the transcript of the Secretary for Development, Mrs Carrie Lam, speaking to the media after attending a radio programme today (March 14):
Reporter: May I ask about the job expo? Why is it important to help professional workers rather than manual workers?
Secretary for Development: The Career Expo is not organised to help professional people. This is a normal recruitment of the Government. We take the advantage because of the scale involved. We have 1,000 jobs, over 90 per cent are professional, general and technical grades. That's why we think that using a career expo will provide more efficient dissemination of information for those who are interested to take on these jobs. In other words, even without a career expo, individual departments will proceed with their normal recruitment procedures to engage these professional staff. A second important objective of the Career Expo is through the exhibition over the three days, through a series of talks that we are organising, we hope to instil confidence in people of Hong Kong that the Government is pressing, is really pressing ahead with infrastructure developments and there will be more jobs created for the construction sector in the years ahead.
Reporter: How about other graduates who image that there will be some jobs for them?
Secretary for Development: This is also a regular scheme of the Development Bureau. Every year, we recruit what we call graduate trainees. They are fresh graduates from the related disciplines in the construction sector including architects, engineers, surveyors, planners and landscape architects. So this year we are offering a bit more. We are offering a total of 135 positions for graduate trainees because we hope that if we could engage more, we might appeal to the private sector also to engage more of these graduate trainees so that when we continue with our infrastructure, we will have the needed professionals to help us to take on the work.
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)
Ends/Saturday, March 14, 2009
Issued at HKT 15:01
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