The Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) released results of the Survey on Manpower Needs and Wages for the first quarter of 2022. Survey coverage for this quarter comprises Manufacturing; Electricity, Gas & Water Supply; Hotels; Restaurants; Child-care and Elderly Care.
Numbers of employees in some industries recorded a year-on-year decrease owing to the pandemic of novel coronavirus pneumonia. At the end of the first quarter of 2022, Hotels had 47,355 full-time employees, down by 4.7% year-on-year. In view of an improved situation of employees on unpaid leave in Hotels compared to the same month last year, coupled with a decrease in the number of lower-paid employees, the average earnings (excluding bonuses) in March increased by 4.8% year-on-year to MOP19,240.
Restaurants had 22,885 full-time employees, a decrease of 4.3% year-on-year. Their average earnings in March rose by 1.6% year-on-year to MOP9,750, which, however, represented a drop of 6.5% compared to the pre-pandemic level in the same month of 2019.
Manufacturing had 8,024 full-time employees, down by 6.0% year-on-year; average earnings in March increased by 2.1% to MOP12,080. Number of full-time employees in Electricity, Gas & Water Supply went down by 1.5% year-on-year to 1,085; as employees of some establishments received more overtime pay in the same month last year, average earnings in March decreased by 6.4% to MOP30,550.
Child-care had 1,537 full-time employees, up by 1.0% year-on-year; their average earnings in March dropped by 0.4% to MOP16,390. Number of full-time employees in Elderly Care grew by 9.6% year-on-year to 1,249, and their average earnings went up by 1.2% to MOP16,040.
At the end of the first quarter, job vacancies in Hotels (545) and Manufacturing (300) decreased by 81 and 236 respectively year-on-year, while those in Restaurants (1,157) increased by 49. For the job vacancies in Hotels, 45.3% required only junior secondary education or lower, while 85.3% and 59.1% required knowledge of Mandarin and English respectively.
In the first quarter, the job vacancy rate (1.1%) of Hotels edged down by 0.1 percentage point year-on-year whereas the employee recruitment rate (2.9%) rose by 0.5 percentage points, which implied that some of the vacancies in Hotels had been filled. As for Restaurants, the job vacancy rate (4.8%) increased by 0.4 percentage points, and the employee turnover rate (7.2%) and the employee recruitment rate (4.9%) went up by 0.9 and 0.2 percentage points respectively; this indicated that there were still vacant posts to be filled in the industry.
In the first quarter, a total of 344,524 employee participants from the surveyed industries attended training courses provided by the establishment (including courses organised by the establishment or in conjunction with other institutions, and those sponsored by the establishment), an increase of 19.4% year-on-year. Participants from Hotels rose by 19.3% year-on-year to 339,642. A total of 3,199 training courses were held for Hotels, and most of the participants took Services courses (47.4%), followed by Business & Administration courses (42.9%); the vast majority of the participants attended courses during office hours. The course fees of 99.6% and 89.4% of the participants from Hotels and Restaurants were paid by the establishments respectively.