Continuous education through building a work-and-learn relationship: How does the industrial attachment program work in Hong Kong

Abstract

In this paper, we reviewed the current university funding situation in Hong Kong for the past five years. We also reviewed the trend of student enrollment numbers to tertiary education in contrast to the support of the continuous education fund (CEF) for citizens. How personal development was build and how the programs were organized will be discussed. An in-depth analysis of the Industrial Attachment (IA) program (sometimes may be called internship program) was studied via three case studies, to understand the program arrangement, effectiveness, and impaction towards the sense of continuous education from the students’ perspective. The case studies we provided include former students sharing their training experience gained from working in a software development house, a financial institute, and a school respectively. Results showed that the industrial attachment program gives various positive implications to the participants in academic, career, and life-long perspectives, which life-long implication is the one affected students the most among the three.