Skills development to enhance employability is an area of vital importance to countries in Asia. Many of the countries are finding it increasingly difficult to respond to the skills needs of their workforce in a time of increasing globalization, new technology and changing patterns of work.

According to a recent report by Robert Half, a total of 90 percent of Hong Kong business leaders believe it will be challenging training employees to adapt to new technology – higher than the APAC (88 percent) and global (78 percent) averages.

In fact, it was found that more than three-quarters of Hong Kong business leaders are finding it difficult to recruit talent with appropriate IT skills – higher than the global average of 71 percent. While just 61 percent of Hong Kong businesses have increased their staff training budgets – lower than the 66 percent recorded across APAC and 63 percent globally.

Elaine Lam, Associate Director of Robert Half Hong Kong, said, “Hong Kong has ambitions to become a global innovation and technology hub, however adopting new technologies on an organizational and workforce level is imperative to driving digital transformation across the city state.”

Although, Hong Kong business are not increasing their training budget at the same rate of their global peers, Hong Kong companies have implemented a variety of training options to help staff adapt to new technology, the research found. These include:

• 48% in-person training through seminars and courses
• 38% working with a mentor
• 36% online courses
• 29% knowledge transfer from interim/contractors/experts to employees

The findings of the report also indicates that the modern workplace is evolving fast and if organizations  want to keep up with the competition they have to implement new  learning mediums to make the workforce keep up with the new skills and be more productive and more efficient.