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There is often confusion between employment in Hong Kong as a Professional or an Imported Worker – this post seeks to clear this up…

QUESTION

First of all I want to say that your website is amazing, easy to understand with relevant information.

My question might be very simple but I cannot find the answer myself.

I need to apply for a working visa, I found that there’s two forms one is ‘Employment as Imported Workers’ and the other is ‘ID990A as professional’.

I only have a Diploma or certificate from my country which may not be a tertiary education and is not a degree in other area which is technical, I have experience in customer service, customer care, reception, and hostels back home and in Australia and now I have the opportunity to unfold myself and work in a hostel in Hong Kong.

In which category am I, what is the best I can do.

ANSWER

So the difference between the two particular application types that you’re looking at really gets down to the difference between being a professional with a visa issued for employment under the General Employment Policy, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the application to the Immigration Department under the Supplementary Labour Scheme as an imported worker which is administered by the Labour Department. And then when that process has played its way through, then the Immigration Department will clearly be responsible for issuing the visa.

So, the importation of labour route is really the supplementary labor scheme. And this is not applicable to you. This is, a program which sophisticated employers take advantage of through a long process of proving to the Labour department satisfaction that the particular types of skills that they are seeking to import into Hong Kong for projects cannot be found locally.

And, on the basis that that project is successfully completed with the Labour department, then the Immigration Department will grant visas for up to two years as a maximum to certain imported workers who fit the particular skills profile that has been pre cleared by the Labour Department as part of the early stage of that importation of labour initiative. So for you this is not relevant.

The question therefore is well, are you a professional for the purposes of the General Employment Policy? And can you expect, given the type of work that you’ve articulated in your question, to get approved to do that type of work?

Well, firstly, to be deemed a professional for the purpose of the General Employment Policy, you’re expected to be either a university graduate with two years post graduation working experience in a managerial or supervisory capacity or you have technical or vocational qualifications which you appear to have being a diploma holder plus five years post qualification working experience in the managerial or supervisory capacity, or if you’re merely a secondary or high school graduate, then you’re expected to have at least ten years post secondary working experience in the managerial or supervisory capacity.

In order to get over the first hurdle of being deemed a professional then, as a second part of the approvability test which the Immigration Department applies to any particular application for an employment visa under the General Employment Policy, you would need to show that you possess special skills, knowledge and experience of value to and not readily available in Hong Kong.

So I think this is where your problem lies because you might very well be able to squeeze yourself into the bracket of being a professional. But then when you turn your attention to the nature of the work that’s proposed for you, which is to manage a hostel, I think you’re going to struggle to convince the Immigration Department that the special skills, knowledge and experience are entailed in that particular activity.

Moreover, I suspect that the Immigration Department are not going to buy into the story that the skills required to run a hostel are not readily available locally. I appreciate that the hostel might be for foreign nationals, I appreciate that there’s a certain camaraderie and a certain sort of culture that prevails among hosteling arrangements globally and the types of people that use them, but for the Immigration Department, their mandate is to protect local jobs wherever possible. And in my experience, given the type of work that’s involved and your profile particularly, I would suggest that you don’t get your hopes up that you’ll get an employment visa in order to do that work.

One other option that might be available to you although it’s not clear from your question what nationality you are, but if you’re a qualifying national for a Working Holiday Visa, then you might be able to get temporary employment permissions to engage in work in a hostel, but that’s not really the question.

Okay, sorry the news is not great, but I hope you found it useful nonetheless.

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