Dr. Winnie Tang, Chairman of Esri China (HK), recently shared her insights on how to tackle smart people issue for building a smart city in Hong Kong through byline articles.

Successful smart cities combine the best features of technology infrastructure with the citizens empowering them. Smart People is the key to success. But top grade high school graduates in Hong Kong tend to enrol in faculties like medicine, law or business as the average annual salary of full-time engineering and technology graduates was approximately HK$200,000 in 2013/14, half of that of medicine, dental and nursing graduates, according to the University Grants Committee statistics.

To improve the salary of these talents as well as to reverse the brain drain, an ecosystem jointly developed by the Government, industry, academia and research sectors for the betterment of career development for the engineering and IT talents is required.

Advanced smart cities should be co-created collectively by people living there. Therefore, if the Government can further carry out a comprehensive review of the ICT education policies, to ensure sufficient human capital is attracted to the development of the technology industry, then we can really have a solid foundation of smart city.

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