Macau Matters | Flawed Career Expectations
Richard Whitfield
For the first time since 2009, I have recently started teaching Project Management courses for university undergraduates. (By the way, I strongly believe that understanding teams and projects is a very important life skill that we should be teaching to primary and secondary school students, and not leaving it until the final years of undergraduate university studies, but that is another story.) Common sense and a lot of education research tells us that when students have a good personal reason for learning a topic they put in much more effort and perform much better. I am sure I am not alone in having frequently had problems at school when trying to learn boring material that only seemed to be in the curriculum to fill up the time available.
Therefore, I decided to ask some of my students about their future career goals, intending to explain how projects and project work will fit in with their future working lives, to give them a personally meaningful reason to learn Project Management. I was flabbergasted when the first student I asked said that she wanted to be a bank teller when she graduated with her Licentiate in Business Administration – I cannot understand why a university student should set such a low career goal, but it is something I have seen again and again. I have also seen it with Master of Business Administration students, who, when asked to think of a good business and develop plans for it in an Entrepreneurship course, can only propose opening a single, small fast-food or clothing shop in Macau, and have no larger vision. I am sure that this phenomenon is not peculiar to Macau, but I find that many reasonably well-educated young people here have very low ambitions for themselves.
As in many places, especially in Asia, there is a bright future for young people lucky enough to be raised in small, rich enclaves like Macau, as long as they are well educated and ambitious. In these enclaves low end work is usually very poorly paid (often because the locals are competing against imported labor from very poor places). Educated “dead wood” is also often quickly shunted into relatively low earning dead-end careers, and the well paid leadership roles are shared by proven expatriates and aggressive and ambitious, well-trained locals.
I totally agree with policies that encourage the recruitment and career progression of bright young local people to maximize the local benefits of development, but there is a fine line to be drawn here because competent leadership is needed to maintain progress. It would be a very bad community outcome for poorly prepared locals to feel entitled to take leadership positions that they are not competent to handle, which unfortunately seems to be the norm in some parts of Asia.
In too many cases I sense that bright young people in Macau are happy enough to set relatively low goals for themselves to have an easy life with “enough” money. Again, this situation is not peculiar to Macau, but I find it puzzling. I also feel that it is wasteful of local people and is not maximizing the local return on development initiatives. I am not sure of the cause and I am not sure of the action to be taken, but I do believe that we need young people in Macau to raise their sights and be more ambitious, but without unduly raising their sense of entitlement – a tricky balancing act, I admit, but one I believe that we need to attempt. Ideas anyone?
