Hong Kong has experienced an economic transformation from a manufacturing-based to a service-based economy which has impacted on the demand for manual labour. In 1992, Employee Retraining Board was set up to provide employees retraining programmes to the unemployed manual workers. This study focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of the programmes in helping the unemployed manual workers to acquire and develop knowledge, skills and abilities so that they can re-enter the labour market. The evaluation is based on assessment of training needs, course design in terms of programme structure and content, course evaluation, and follow-up services conducted by the selected training bodies. It is found that the overall effectiveness of the overall programme is low. The official indicators - participation rate and job placement rate - used by the training bodies tend to provide rnisleading evaluation results
