Shades Off | Hong Kong needs tech talent, but young people still prefer to be doctors, lawyers and bankers
- Most of this year’s DSE top scorers want to study medicine – a fine choice, especially given our city’s brutal experience with Covid-19
- But if Hong Kong is to become China’s IT hub, as Xi Jinping expects, it will need to encourage its youth to explore more creative paths, too
For all Hong Kong’s claims to be a forward-looking city, it has a remarkably conservative and traditional nature. Doctors, lawyers and bankers are perceived as having prestigious and highly paid jobs, an age-old outlook. Academically gifted students are more often than not driven by parents, teachers and schools towards those professions.
I am not surprised that of the eight top achievers in this year’s Diploma of Secondary Education exams, six want to become doctors, one a lawyer and the other to study quantitative finance and risk management.
But I’m making assumptions; I don’t know for sure what was discussed with parents or school career-guidance staff. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic with a sixth wave threatening, it is perhaps understandable that students with the marks would want to become doctors.
