The Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) released results of the Survey on Manpower Needs and Wages for the first quarter of 2018. Survey coverage for this quarter comprises Manufacturing; Hotels; Restaurants; Insurance; Financial Intermediation Activities; Electricity, Gas & Water Supply; Child-care and Elderly Care. This survey excludes the self-employed, as well as insurance agents and brokers not directly employed by insurance companies.
At the end of the first quarter of 2018, Hotels had 57,050 full-time employees, up by 4.8% year-on-year; average earnings (excluding bonuses) of full-time employees in March rose by 5.3% to MOP17,910. Restaurants had 26,810 full-time employees, up by 7.3% year-on-year, with the average earnings falling slightly by 0.9% to MOP9,200.
Manufacturing had 9,662 full-time employees, a decrease of 1.7% year-on-year; average earnings in March rose by 4.4% to MOP11,260. Electricity, Gas & Water Supply had 1,122 full-time employees, up marginally by 0.9% from a year earlier; average earnings grew by 7.0% to MOP32,050.
Insurance had 564 full-time employees, up by 2.9% year-on-year; average earnings in March rose by 2.5% to MOP27,450. Financial Intermediation Activities had 361 full-time employees, a year-on-year decrease of 11.3%, with the average earnings rising by 7.9% to MOP15,370.
Child-care and Elderly Care had 1,422 and 707 full-time employees respectively, up by 8.4% and 4.7% year-on-year; average earnings in March increased by 5.7% and 5.0% respectively to MOP15,130 and MOP14,530.
At the end of the first quarter, the number of vacant posts in Manufacturing (1,058), Restaurants (2,294) and Hotels (2,184) went up by 346, 264 and 255 respectively from a year earlier. Moreover, 68.3% of the vacancies in Manufacturing and 52.3% of those in Restaurants merely required junior secondary education or lower. All of the vacancies in Financial Intermediation Activities required knowledge of Mandarin; meanwhile, 64.9% and 46.8% of the vacancies in Hotels required knowledge of Mandarin and English respectively.
In the first quarter, the employee recruitment rate (5.8%) and the job vacancy rate (3.7%) of Hotels rose by 1.6 and 0.3 percentage points respectively year-on-year, implying that there were still a number of vacancies available in the industry. For Restaurants, the employee turnover rate (6.7%) and the job vacancy rate (7.9%) grew by 2.4 and 0.4 percentage points respectively, while the employee recruitment rate (5.5%) dropped by 1.1 percentage points, indicating that the manpower situation in the industry has not improved.
In the first quarter, a total of 211,493 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 employer), up notably by 46.8% year-on-year. Hotels had 208,668 participants in vocational training, with most of them attending Services courses (51.5%), followed by Business & Administration courses (39.5%); the majority of the participants attended courses during office hours. Meanwhile, over 70% of the participants from most of the industries attended courses paid by the establishment, while the corresponding rate in Child-care was only 38.1%.