The long hard road off campus

Looking into the Bay Area

Ken Shen, an IT graduate of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, is lucky enough to have secured a slot at a tech startup in Shenzhen after working as an intern data analyst for the same company since the Lunar New Year holidays.

Shen, regarding himself an "early bird", started job hunting in December and got five offers from some 60 job applications, mostly from Shenzhen employers, although the coronavirus outbreak had very much hampered the search for his first job.

The 23-year-old was an economics student before switching to computing studies. "I didn't decide on a very specific career path. I was just trying different projects and internships and, ultimately, found my interest in becoming a data engineer." Shen said.

"Many of my classmates in Hong Kong would have been doing internships in Shenzhen, but they are stuck in Hong Kong because of the mandatory quarantine policy on both sides of the boundary," he said.

Shenzhen — the nation's tech hub — hasn't lost its allure among young high-end professionals even when the pandemic disrupted their career plans overall. Growing demand for teleconferencing and telecommuting has fueled the expansion of tech enterprises.

"We rolled out a larger-scale recruitment drive than last year's because a new product was in the pipeline," said Zhong Jinghua, co-founder of SpeechX — an artificial intelligence-enabled startup with offices in Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

"My company does not discriminate against fresh graduates. They'll be given equal consideration as long as they've rich internship or university project experience," said Zhong, who has a doctorate degree from CUHK.

She said her company has a larger and better talents pool this year as other employers have cut job openings amid the public health crisis.

Besides tech openings, PolyU's Cheng said the university offers fresh graduates placements in finance, logistics, engineering, tourism and architecture, with the help of alumni and partner enterprises in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.

For Hong Kong students graduating from mainland universities, starting a career in the Bay Area is gathering momentum. Currently, about 15,000 Hong Kong students are pursuing degrees on the mainland with about 3,000 students graduating each year, according to OCTS Youth Forum — a think tank on Hong Kong youth's development on the mainland.

According to an OCTS survey among students from 2014 to 2018, about 60 percent of the respondents were already working, or considering a career in the Bay Area in the next two years, with Shenzhen as the top destination. About half of them had studied in Guangdong province, while more than a quarter are currently working in the Bay Area.

OCTS founder and Chairman Henry Ho Kin-chung said a major obstacle facing this year's graduates is the quarantine policy, as well as the shutdown of mainland university campuses.

Bill Ko, 24, is set to get his bachelor's degree at Guangzhou's Jinan University this month, but he can no longer return to campus before graduation. "The university only allows students staying on the mainland to return."

In Hong Kong since early January this year, Ko had been looking for a marketing job in the city but, unsurprisingly, it was fruitless. "There were too many graduates and too few vacancies. We can hardly compete with experienced candidates."

Ho said: "It's very hard to predict their employment prospects at this stage. Many of them are stranded in Hong Kong at present, so we're in touch with local companies to try to get internships for them to gain some workplace experience."

Ko has another option. Along with three of his classmates, who are all Hong Kong-born students, he is running an education consultancy startup at an incubation center in Guangzhou.

"I may return to Guangzhou once the travel restrictions are lifted. The Bay Area is definitely a place for me to live in and thrive in future," he said.