#Hashtag Hong Kong

Walter Tsui, Co-Founder & CEO of CareER Association

Higher educated people with disabilities and special education needs have a much higher unemployment rate than the general populations. In 2016, we have a survey. We reviewed that half of the population for higher educated people with disability was unemployed at that time. For those employed, nearly 40 percent, they took more than half a year to find the first job. We realize a lot of our higher educated graduates from university - if they have disabilities and special education needs they were expected to work in low-skilled labour jobs such as cashier, a server in a restaurant or even those having a stigmatized effect that we couldn't perform professionally. In 2010, increasing number of higher education are given to people with disabilities. It was caused by the integration education implementation and also the 12 years free education in Hong Kong.

I am Walter Tsui, a person with visually impaired. I was born in 1988 and I graduated with my degree in economics and minor in German in 2011. It was the big fear of graduation equals to unemployment. I was working in multinational companies and investment banking when I was in university. However it was extremely hard to find my first job. Searching more than half a year, eventually I was placed into a human resources role in a construction firm. After I secured my jobs in a commercial world I realized there are so many of our peers with disability just like myself who are struggling in the battlefields of getting career development opportunities. Eventually I quit my commercial jobs in 2015 to found the organization called CareER. It’s a charity registered in Hong Kong dedicated to support higher educated students and graduates with disabilities and special needs in Hong Kong for employment. We focus on ability not disability. We serve 10 kinds of disability types including visually impaired, hearing impaired, mobility impaired, neurodivergence and also people who are experiencing mental well-being issues. We serve as a peer support community for our mutual support but for our employers it is an untapped talent pool.

And also we are a free of charge recruitment channel, providing talent solutions for our employers. Every day we are supporting the society for supply of talents and nurturing inclusive hiring. So first in our candidate empowerment side we focus on two very important things. One is to empower the employment readiness for our candidates. Therefore we have coaching, workshops, partnering with our major corporate partners and also we have run our inclusive recruitment fair.Second we need to focus on building our disability pride, disability acceptance and our own confidence to disclose our disabilities. Therefore peer support is so important because we let our alumni, to share our experience going into the workplace so that no one should feel shame on disclosing disabilities at the workplace throughout the recruitment cycles as well as onboarding and at the workplace. After the COVID time we realize there are two elements need to add into it. There are social manner trainings at the workplace as well as focusing on the mental well-being support for the younger generation for highly educated people with disabilities.

So second we also need to nurture the demands of our talents with disabilities. So we need to work on the willingness to hire as well as the readiness to hire with our employers. Therefore we have developed CareER Disability Inclusion Index, which is a systematic approach to nurture disability re-inclusive readiness with our employers from a leadership commitment on this topic, social commitment, HR practices, flexible working arrangements and workplace accessibility on physical and digital environments.

The both candidate empowerment structure as well as our employer disability readiness structure has been recognized by United Nations Affiliated Award Zero Project Award in 2021 and 2025. So after 10 years of our work we have surveyed on our CareER candidates pool we realize now we have improved the unemployment or we have improved the employment rate from 10 years ago - it was 50% of employment and now actually over 70% of our candidates already got a permanent job in their journey. Now in this fluctuating economy and also a talent loss in Hong Kong, we need to have more employers tapping into this untapped talent pool and we should become a talent solution for you to provide an alternative or new energies into the workplace

And at the same time after the COVID and also the current labor market we need to invest more of our energies to train our members on the social manner workplace etiquette and also the more important would be the mental well-being of the younger generations when they're transiting into the workplace from school. Let's work together to build a more inclusive society and community together with disabilities. Today I'm bringing in for those who are working together with us to drive disability inclusion including our volunteers, advisors and our staff teams. We always dream to have a better world with all peoples are equal and also have a universal designed environment for all. We understand this dream is sometimes quite crazy but I know I'm not the only one. So bringing you the song Imagine by John Lennon