Hong Kong Science and Technology Parks Corporation (HKSTP) InnoAcademy confirmed the 2021 cohort for its flagship programme – Technology Leaders of Tomorrow (TLT) programme.
The TLT 2021 comprises a total of 12 innovation and technology (I&T) talents with five females and seven males selected from over 900 applicants, who are recent graduates with a Bachelor’s to Doctoral degree in the science or engineering in local as well as overseas universities including the University of Cambridge and Nanyang Technological University.
Under the theme “Start Now, Impact Tomorrow”, the 26-month TLT programme aims to cultivate Hong Kong’s technology leader capabilities across four key areas: Vision and Entrepreneurial Mindset; Grit and Passion; Technology Expertise and Business Sense; and Effective Communication and Team Building.
The CEO of HKSTP stated that attracting and nurturing top talent is critical for supporting the development of Hong Kong into the world’s leading I&T hub. For HKSTP InnoAcademy’s TLT programme this year, HKSTP is glad to see increasing interest from local and overseas young talent with more gender diversity.
This programme will continue to be instrumental in building the pipeline of next-generation technology leaders to reinforce Hong Kong’s competitive edge in deep tech and innovation.
The TLT 2021 programme has engaged partner companies and outreached to companies outside Science Park, across the fields of Artificial Intelligence & Robotics, Biomedical Technology, Data and Smart City and FinTech. The 12 TLT 2021 talents have already been on-boarded in August with a two-month internship at HKSTP, which is followed by full-time R&D roles with one of the participating companies for another 24 months.
Comprised of forward-looking learning opportunities, the two-month HKSTP internship includes a one-week “Innovation Challenge” where the talents stayed at HKSTP’s smart living and co-creation space InnoCell for the week and ideated as a real start-up team to tackle real-world challenges.
HKSTP InnoAcademy partnered with the University of Chicago Yuen Campus Hong Kong to provide a series of innovation and leadership training during the Innovation Challenge to ignite the entrepreneurial spirit. During the two-month internship, the young talents also joined visits to research centres, exclusive dialogues with leaders from technology unicorns such as SenseTime and SmartMore, as well as leadership sharing by HKSTP executives to gain first-hand exposure to the local I&T ecosystem.
After completion of the two-month internship in mid-October, the TLT talents will join their respective companies to receive on-the-job training and gain practical work skills and experiences. The host company will provide a full career development plan with assigned dedicated mentors. Ongoing feedback and evaluation will be given while HKSTP will also facilitate mid-term and final assessments to evaluate the talent development progress throughout the programme.
The Global Digital Talent Acquisition Market was valued at US$41.2 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach US$79.6 billion by 2027, at a CAGR of 8.58% during the forecast period. According to the report, based on skill segment, AI developers are the fastest-growing sub-segment in the digital talent acquisition market owing to numerous platforms that have been created to upscale digital talent skills over the years, as the emergence of AI in talent management.
The digital talent acquisition market is projected to be driven by increasing innovations and technological advancements. As the Big Data analytics industry quickly grows to include mainstream customers, technologies like Hadoop and cloud solutions are in demand and they have growth potential. So, it is expected to boost the digital talent acquisition market in the near future. An enormous amount of structured and unstructured data is available in firms owing to increased Internet adoption and they need digitally skilled people to manage the same. Limited awareness regarding the benefits of digital skills is hindering the development of digital talent. Some end-users are still not aware of the importance of digital skills. Despite the evolution of technology, the adoption of tools associated with digital skills still remains challenging. So, it is restraining the growth of the digital talent acquisition market globally.
