Hong Kong’s Gini coefficient is at its new peak in 45 years and it is still progressively increasing. It is statistically proven that life is much tougher now for underprivileged young people.
The saying “天行健君子以自強不息” cannot fully be applied to young people in Hong Kong nowadays as blindly giving effort with no direction is no longer effective in Hong Kong, an extremely competitive International city. Moreover, many secondary school students are forced to plan their career path and to select a major in university without understanding the essence of the industry that they have chosen.
In order to resolve the issue of secondary school students not knowing their life direction, we provided a series of programmes, competitions and internships to them, aiming to improve their:
1. Life direction
2. Presentation skills
3. Study methodology
4. Alert to criminal traps
The key objectives:
- To help secondary school student to understand different work environment and work culture, in order to levitate work interest of different industries to the students;
- Using short video to introduce and define the daily work of different industries, to increase their understanding of different industries;
- Through cooperation with Education Bureau, the business industry, and various Non-Profit Organizations, to help secondary school students with their career planning.
Project milestone:
1. Opening
In the opening on 30th April, we introduced the overview of the “Torch of Hope” programme to the students and teachers and opened for application.
2. Life planning, Curriculum Vitae(CV) and elevator pitch workshop
At the very beginning of June, we hosted semi-virtual seminars on 6 professions including Law, Medicine, Engineering, Innovation, Banking and Accounting. Each profession consists of 3 mentors in 3 aspects of the profession, take Law as an example: we have a law firm partner, a criminal barrister and a civil barrister. Each student can choose 3 mentors and have a 40 minutes session with each of them for career advice.
Also, we have invited an expert in communication to teach students in preparation for their CV and elevator pitch for the competition on 18th June.
3. Elevator Pitch Competition
In order to hone the presentation skills of the students, we host an elevator pitch competition on the 18th of June and individual feedback is given to the students for self-improvement. The students that passed the benchmark will receive internships from the mentors. Also, we invited a professional speaking trainer to teach students public speaking skills, which would also help and increase their confidence when speaking in front of the audience by utilizing different strategies.
4. Closing
All students come back to receive their graduation certificates and with seminars on motivations, study methodology, and crime awareness given by Past National President George Lung, social worker Bob Li and a World Record holder on memory respectively.
5. Internships
Students received customised internships according to their first 3 preferences. We had 28 mentors, providing over 200 hours of career planning advice, and internships to 170 students from 79 schools in the programme. We have also received great feedback from the partners that they found this internship programme very inspirational as they are surprised by how prepared the students are.
So it seems like the Dragon Apprentice 2022 ended here but it’s not! With the great achievement we made this year, OC team has constantly engaged with the schools and partners. We foresee that the OC team will pass on the torch to the 2023’s OC team making it another great event. We wish we have shed some lights on the student’s future career path and hope it could help them to plan their career better and earlier.
