Japanese speaking talents’ market trend and current status – Hong Kong case

This series is going to explain Japanese speaking talents’ current status and market trend that may be useful for local recruitment in Asian countries. This time we discuss about Hong Kong.

Hong Kong

Scale of Japanese speaking manpower

According to the Society of Japanese Language Education in Hong Kong, in 2016, the number of people studying Japanese language in Hong Kong is over 20,000 people. Back to several years ago, the number was approximately 22,000 people, as stated by the Survey Report 2012~2013 of Japan Foundation. Also reported by the same survey, Japanese-language education at private institutions in Hong Kong has flourished, with 75.5% learners studying Japanese outside schools. Moreover, there were around 11,000 people taking part in Japanese Language Proficiency Test every year from 2012 to 2015, so it’s expected that there will be no significant shift in the number of Japanese learners. Taking advantages of close affinity between the official language Cantonese and Japanese, the percentage of N2, N1 people is relatively high among these learners.

Value of Japanese language proficiency

As said by InvestHK, there are over 1,380 Japanese companies in Hong Kong. Thus, Japanese speaking talents are in demand to some extent. In managerial level, the number of people from Mainland China and Hong Kong has risen. However, even in Japanese companies, they mostly need to communicate in English, so the need of Japanese speaking Hong Kongers is declining. It can be concluded that the advantage of Japanese language ability is decreasing.

Applicants’ activities

In such a region where companies require the ability to hit the ground running like Hong Kong, instead of hiring new graduates, it’s common for both fresh graduates and job-changing people to apply and get a job when some positions are open. In Hong Kong’s universities, classes finish in May and June and students graduate in October, but the peak of job hunting among new graduates is often around June of next year.

Moreover, people are more likely to change their jobs with the reasons, “better offer from another company” or “dissatisfied with salary and bonus”. So people who requires higher salary tends to change jobs. Especially, many companies puzzle over young talents with little working experience. Regarding the job searching methods, people who wish to change jobs mainly use recruit agents, job search websites, free publications etc.