AL Plenary | Lawmakers focus on shortage of qualified professionals

Ip Sio Kai

The Legislative Assembly (AL) plenary convened again yesterday to continue to hear the spoken enquiries from lawmakers and responses from the government, regarding the lack of qualified human resources staff in Macau.

Several lawmakers inquired as to which tasks are currently being performed by the Talents Development Committee (CDT) in regard to this problem.

The Committee’s Secretary-General, Sou Chio Fai, explained that the government has conducted studies that detected a lack of qualified personnel in the mid- and upper-classes, and has already launched three different programs that target different sectors such as the “Incentive Plan for Qualified Professionals,” the “Incentive Plan for the Qualified Professionals, and the Skilled Talents Acquiring Plan” and the “Elites Nurturing Plan.”

Sou noted that the CDT has been working together with several institutions and offering scholarships and other relevant programs to foster local residents’ development as well as to strive for the return of the around “160,000 Macau residents that, due to academic or work reasons, are spread all over the world, and in which a good part are qualified staff in several professional fields.” He estimated that from these, “the ones that live and study in the mainland are over 100,000.”

Despite the several studies and programs noted by Sou, the lawmakers reaffirmed their position that Macau is not doing enough and reiterated that at the same time that the MSAR is trying to attract these “highly qualified” people, other neighboring regions are doing the same, questioning also which specific areas the Macau government is targeting.

The Secretary-General of CDT agreed that Macau must make a bigger effort, “We must be more active and keen on these works,” explaining that one of the bigger focuses of the CDT is the “Database of Talents.” This is separated into “three main areas: Scientific Investigators, Finance and Social and Health Fields,” and Sou added that the government has been paying a lot of attention to try to attract these talents to Macau, trying to demonstrate that, “Macau has only 31 square kilometres but [possesses] opportunities that expand to other [neighboring] regions.”

In this aspect, Sou said that it is important to keep in contact with residents that go abroad to study because it is normal that if they study abroad eventually they end up establishing their lives there. “We have been trying to keep that contact through several ways in order to convince these people to return and pay service in Macau,” he noted.

Raising a high number of questions in the debate was lawmaker Mak Soi Kun, who called on Sou to explain the concepts of “elites” and of “qualified staff” and whether the government is thinking of attracting these people by “skipping” the requirements of the government centralized system tenders.

Ip Sio Kai was urging the government to have a “sense of urgency” and face the matter as an “urgent matter that need to be solved,” suggesting that the government begin hiring needed qualified staff from abroad, noting, “this is not going to jeopardize in any way the job of local people but instead help to develop the region and in that way benefit all [the society].”

Ip recalled that the government has a “Human Resources Reserve Database” that has more than 9,000 people registered and in which over 7,000 are residents, calling on the executive to move forward and solve the problem by hiring them.

Sou Chio Fai

The same lawmakers had already expressed a similar position on the previous day, when Ella Lei called for the training of locals to focus on the most important tasks and develop their careers, saying, “I think and agree that we can open more training opportunities for locals to reach a more professional level but we lack a lot of human resources and we have a lot of non-resident workers, this is clear,” she said.

“The non-resident workers (TNR) are also important and they are also working towards the development of Macau. These people also need training and there isn’t any [for them] as they aren’t locals.” Ip replied. “We need to train also the TNR to perform better and develop the performance of the local companies. There are people that can legally work in Macau but then cannot make accreditation tests and others,” he noted, giving the example of the insurance mediators. “This does not make sense,” Ip concluded.

It was an opinion which, as during the previous day, provoked criticism from Lei, who said, “We [are] not supposed to import talents but to train ours locally,” then gave some statistics: “From the 154,000 [workers], we already have 5,856 [imported] specialized workers, which account for 3.8 percent of the total,” he said, urging the CDT to “think on how to perform local training” and not “to go abroad [and] get more people.” Finally a quota was proposed for the hiring of such staff of “one-for-one” [one locally-trained to one hired from abroad].

Elaborating on the idea was Chan Iek Lap, who picked up the case of the Traditional Chinese Medicine physicians. “We keep talking about import but we don’t give enough opportunities and show incapacity to deal with the ones [talents] we have and to give them job opportunities,” he said.

Also on the topic, lawmaker Chan Hong said that he hopes that CDT “could [better] perform its duties,” recalling cases of professions such as Information Technology and Mechanics, in which she claims, “There are many residents working outside, but Macau seems not be attractive in any way for these people to return. They have no trust that here they will manage to live their lives,” concluding by saying, “Talents and land plots are the things that we lack […] in Macau.”

Merging of two bus companies confirmed

At the plenary session to reply to several spoken enquiries, the Secretary for Transport and Public Works, Raimundo do Rosario, responded affirmatively to the question of lawmaker Ho Ion Sang over whether it was true that two of the current public buses operators (TCM and New Era) will merge into a single company.

The question was one of the very few that Rosario responded to on the topic of the bus operators, explaining that “we are now at the last stage of the negotiations [with the companies] and would not be [appropriate] or convenient to reveal the details at this stage.”

The acknowledgement by Rosario that TCM and New Era will merge into a single company also raised questions from other lawmakers about the process.

Rosario explained, “there a contract term that allows this merging. So both companies presented such request and we authorized,” he said. “We believe that this will have a positive contribution to the public transport system as Macau is a small territory and we find it a good solution for two companies to turn into one.”

Advancing on the possible advantages the merger, Rosario also said that it “might turn out that we have less overlapped buses and better optimization”  of transport routes, reaffirming that he believes (and the companies have given guarantees) that there will be no problems with drivers and other workers.

As for the possibility of adding more environmentally-friendly buses – namely using electricity or natural gas as fuels – the Secretary said that for now there are many limitations regarding both systems, namely on the location for the refueling of natural gas-powered buses.

On the topic, Lam Hin San, director of the Transport Bureau, added that at the moment, “11 percent of the casino shuttle buses are already eco-friendly” and the government has the goal to extend the fleet of such vehicles operating in the public system to a total of 120 by 2020, almost two-fold the existing number.