More than 1,000 employees working in the gaming departments of SJM Resorts have been retrained and transferred to non-gaming roles.
The news was announced yesterday at the launch of a cross-training development programme jointly organised by the gaming concessionaire and the Labour Affairs Bureau.
The scheme, reported in industry media, aims to equip gaming staff with the skills necessary to switch to fields such as food and beverage, human resources and marketing.
[See more: The iconic Macau Palace gets a new lease of life]
Speaking at Monday’s event, the head of the Labour Bureau, Wong Chi Hong, said SJM was helping to create “a diverse pool of tourism and leisure industry talent for the industry and Macao”.
SJM managing director Daisy Ho said through the initiative SJM was “providing systematic professional certification training courses for gaming staff to help them enter non-gaming positions more quickly and better”.
Last month, she told Portugal’s Lusa news agency that non-gaming tourism was “a huge potential market” and that it was on course to “grow faster than the gaming segment”.