Letters | How to learn crucial skills for future success as graduate jobs tank

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LettersHow to learn crucial skills for future success as graduate jobs tank
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Published: 11:30am, 15 Aug 2026
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Think of the most capable person you work with. The one who says the brief is wrong, spots the cost nobody costed or works out that everyone is solving the wrong problem

They did not learn that at school. They likely learned it in their 20s, doing junior work. Reading scans, sitting in on meetings they did not understand yet, watching somebody senior make a decision and slowly working out why. The tasks were dull and repetitive. Doing them for years is how their judgment got built

That base is now narrowing. Graduate vacancies in Hong Kong have fallen by 61 per cent since 2022. Your newspaper has covered the possible reasons for this – artificial intelligence, economic pressures, competition from the mainland – better than I could.

But starting at the bottom was never only a job. It was the machine that made the people at the top, and it is being taken away

On the other hand, 12 years of formal education are an effective machine for producing one capability: completing a well-defined task to somebody else’s standard by somebody else’s deadline. That is precisely what those first jobs used to pay for

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Source: www.scmp.com