CHEUNG TSZ-HIM, 29, LIFEGUARD TO FOREMAN
When Cheung Tsz-him left school he wanted to go to university, but he was not the academic type and he did not have the grades. Dejected, he took a job as a lifeguard at a residential swimming pool in Discovery Bay, where he was paid HK$18,000 a month, plus food and lodging.
Cheung was pleased to make that much money straight out of school, but it meant working 15-hour days and after not too long, “I didn’t want to sit around any more, I wanted to learn something,” he says. He started looking into construction and wanted to go into bar bending – making rebar, “which has a relatively high salary but that course was full, so I went into the next option, which was concrete”.
He joined the intermediate tradesman collaborative training scheme at the Construction Industry Council and learned everything about concrete, from mixing it to delivering it to the top of a building site as well as pouring, smoothing and repairing it, when needed. After three years of site experience, he trained to become a foreman in 2019.
“Anything on a building that has to do with concrete is my responsibility,” he says. “Sometimes [older employees] dismiss me as a young person who doesn’t know much, but when I explain the technical aspects of what needs to be done, they realise that I know what I’m talking about.”
Currently he manages three construction sites for residential and public housing. While work begins at 8am, he says he has to be onsite by 7.30am.
Cheung took an additional certification course at the Occupational Safety and Health Council, so now worker safety is part of his remit, and thinking back to being bored by a pool more than six years ago, he is pleased with his career choice.
“I’m learning new things all the time because different projects have different designs,” he says. “When we finish constructing a building, I can tell people I helped build it and tell the stories behind it. It doesn’t have my name on it, but it’s something that will be around in Hong Kong for a long time.”