The Statistics and Census Service (DSEC) released results of the Survey on Manpower Needs and Wages of the Gaming Sector for the second quarter of 2012. Survey coverage excluded junket promoters and junket associates. At the end of the second quarter of 2012, the Gaming Sector had 52,789 employees, up by 11.6% year-on-year. By occupation 23,144 were dealers, up by 11.2% year-on-year; 14,424 were hard & soft count clerks, cage cashiers, pit bosses, casino floorpersons, betting service operators, etc., up by 15.2%. In June 2012, average earnings (excluding bonuses and allowances) of full-time employees stood at MOP17,740, up by 7.8% year-on-year, of which average earnings of dealers increased by 8.6% over June 2011 to MOP15,810 and that of hard & soft count clerks, cage cashiers, pit bosses, casino floorpersons, betting service operators, etc. rose by 5.8% to MOP21,600. Average earnings of casino & slot machine attendants, security guards, surveillance room operators, etc. amounted to MOP11,990, up by 13.5% year-on-year. At the end of the second quarter of 2012, number of job vacancies totalled 1,821, down by 321 year-on-year. Vacancies for dealers stood at 787, while 366 were for hard & soft count clerks, cage cashiers, pit bosses, casino floorpersons, betting service operators, etc., down by 1.6% and 52.0% respectively. In terms of recruitment prerequisites, 50.7% of the vacancies required working experience; 62.3% required junior secondary education or lower and 18.6% required senior secondary education. Besides Cantonese, other preferred language skills were Mandarin (84.0%) and English (63.3%). In the second quarter of 2012, 4,278 new employees were hired, lower than the 5,182 recruits in the fourth quarter of 2011, bringing the employee recruitment rate down by 2.4 percentage points to 8.4%; at the same time, the employee turnover rate (5.9%) and job vacancy rate (3.4%) fell by 0.7 and 1.0 percentage point respectively, indicating a slowdown in the demand of human resources.
