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(b) whether, upon the scheduled completion of the new airport in the first quarter of 1998, local professionals will have received adequate training or equipped themselves with appropriate technical skills to handle the management of the airport with minimum dependence on the service of overseas professionals?
Reply:
Mr President,
The Provisional Airport Authority's employment policy is to recruit the best person for the job through open recruitment. Priority is given to appointment of permanent residents of Hong Kong given qualifications being equal. The Authority only recruits from overseas in the absence of suitably qualified candidates in Hong Kong.
The Authority now has a staff team of 1,420, of which some 85% are residents of Hong Kong. Of the rest, over 90% are in the Project Division of the Authority, which has to turn to overseas recruitment because of insufficient suitable local candidates who are experienced in building new airports. The vast majority of these will leave the Authority on completion of the specific project for which they are employed.
The Authority is mindful of the need to train up local professionals with knowledge and expertise in planning and managing the new airport. It actively pursues this objective in the following ways.
Within the Authority, local and overseas staff work together on an on-going basis in teams. This team work ensures that a process of cross-fertilisation takes place in the daily work of the Authority whereby not only the local staff benefit by sharing the experience and acquiring the expertise and knowledge of their overseas colleagues, overseas staff also benefit by learning from their local counterparts about local planning, building and construction practices. Under this team approach, technology transfer is a natural process achieved through continuous cross-learning on the parts of both local and overseas staff.