Abstract: This paper first reviews three historical stages of social work development in Hong Kong in relation to helping young people overcome the employment problems: from periphery to core, from singleness to comprehensiveness and ultimately breaking through the bottleneck. Then the paper applies the concepts of human capital (micro), social capital (mezzo) and demand insufficiency (macro) to summarize the models employed by social workers in Hong Kong. In the aspect of human capital, social workers help unemployed young people in accordance with their learning ability and motivation, provide onestop employment services, and assist students in career planning. In the aspect of social capital, social workers enhance the employment opportunities for the vulnerable young people and reconstruct their social network. In addition, social workers solve the supply problem by creating jobs, delivering services to cultivate entrepreneurship and selfemployment of young people and developing social enterprises. These models have some implications for social work in Mainland China. First, the integration of social capital investment can be effective in promoting youth employment. Second, social workers can cooperate with enterprises and public institutions and even create shortterm jobs for young people. Last but not the least, the effective employment service should focus on the process of assessment, training, consultation and followup. However, all of these are premised on the development of social work agencies specializing in employment services for young people in Mainland China.

Key words: Hong Kong, young people, employment services, social work