‘Skills currency’ must take precedence during hiring process: Chan Chun Sing

WHILE degree and diploma qualifications are still relevant today, they must be complemented with “just-in-time” upgrading modules that can help plug specific skill gaps within companies, said Education Minister Chan Chun Sing on Tuesday (Jul 5).

Stressing that skills currency must increasingly take precedence in the hiring process, he added that a company’s human resource department must also take into consideration the skills that are in demand when it comes to recruitment and designing jobs.

“This will allow companies to focus more on skills and competencies, rather than relying only on qualifications, such as degrees or diplomas, as a proxy of the candidate’s suitability,” he said in a speech at the start of the SkillsFuture Forum.

Chan shared how, at a separate event in February, he had said that the success of Singapore’s education system was more than just preparing a cohort of 30,000 to 40,000 students each year for the job market. There is also a need to support the timely reskilling and upskilling of the country’s 2.5 million resident workforce, with potentially several hundred thousand adults needing to go for training every few years.

“Since then, international experts have told me that we might be underestimating our country’s training needs. Countries with a high performing adult training system, such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway, have over 60 per cent of working adults learning something new every year,” he said.

Chan highlighted 4 key challenges which the Republic must overcome to upskill its workforce at scale.

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Firstly, Singapore needs to find ways to get busy working adults to make upgrading their skills a priority.

“Many (working adults) tend to apply a high discount rate towards training due to the tyranny of the ‘urgent’ and the ‘here-and-now’. Bread and butter issues understandably occupy their minds,” said Chan.

“Given these, we have to find ways to reach the workers to activate their interest and commitment to training,” he added. This requires a “whole of system effort” that does not depend on just the companies.

Another challenge is helping companies to articulate the demand for new skills. Technological disruptions are driving the demand for new skills, but individual companies may not have the ability and capacity to identify these emerging trends.

“This is particularly challenging for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that are often resource strapped, constrained by the day-to-day demands of business operations,” said Chan.

That is why, the trade associations and chambers (TACs), unions and the government – through SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG) – must come in and take the lead, he said.

For example, SSG published the Skills Demand for the Future Economy report last December, drawing on data from global, regional and local job-skills trends. The first Jobs and Skills Quarterly Insights report will also be published later this month to point Singaporeans, enterprises and training providers to where the growth areas and in-demand skills are.

A third challenge is getting the different sectors to aggregate the skills demand of their sectors.

“This is particularly pertinent for industry sectors with more fragmented structures,” said Chan. The TACs, being an important bridge between the government and employers, must therefore step in as intermediaries.

They will take the leading role in supporting and engaging SMEs to identify the skills needs in their companies; facilitate timely dissemination of jobs and skills insights; and put in place structures to accredit skills required at the workplace.

Lastly, more focus must be placed on how adult education is delivered. While much effort has been spared by SSG to ensure that training programmes are of a high quality and accessible, “further enablers are needed”, said Chan.

“Our training providers and institutes of higher learning must step up to the role to combine the currency of frontier industry knowledge with the best andragogical practices for our adult learners,” he added.

To strengthen their capabilities, the Institute of Adult Learning will bring together leading institutes and industry stakeholders to develop best practices and new techniques of training.

At the SkillsFuture Forum, IAL signed 2 memorandums of understanding with the polytechnics and the NTUC Learning Hub aimed at enhancing capability development in the training and adult education sector.

One of the agreements seeks to synergise IAL’s expertise in adult learning with the polytechnics’ institutional capabilities in education and outreach. A community of practice will be created to facilitate exchanges and sharing of best practices between staff, adult educators and the polytechnics’ adjunct educators.

The agreement will also involve the curation development and delivery of industry-relevant training programmes, as well as short-term two-way attachments between IAL and the polytechnics.

The second agreement will see IAL, NTUC Learning Hub and SSG collaborating to build the adult education domain at scale. This includes providing opportunities for continuing professional development and establishing the NTUC Learning Hub’s Career Agility Hub as a platform for practitioners to build their skills and portfolios.

The SSG’s funding framework will also be refined to better support training and manpower outcomes. From January 2024, non-certifiable courses will no longer be able to receive SSG subsidies, and attendees will not be able to use their SkillsFuture credits to cover the course fees, said SSG in a separate statement.

Right now, such courses make up 7 per cent of SSG-funded courses and receive the lowest tier of subsidy. “With the lowest tier removed, SSG funding will better focus on certifiable and industry-recognised courses of higher quality,” said SSG.

The agency acknowledged that some non-certifiable courses aid with important social and economic functions, such as courses teaching individuals how to care for seniors in their household. “SSG will work with public agencies to identify these courses, and we will continue to fund them”.

Currently, some S$700 million is spent each year in SkillsFuture training subsidies for Singaporeans and companies. “As we continue to invest in our people and companies, we must also ensure that the training is continuously refreshed to meet the objectives of job placement, skills deepening, and career advancement for the individual,” said Chan.

“Competition and survival are about the speed of evolution. Whoever that can help our workers and businesses evolve faster will be the winner,” said the minister. “And to achieve that speed of evolution, we will need all your ideas and help... I always believe that if any society can get their system right by combining the best of our industry ideas, the best of our institutional programmes and processes, then Singapore must be one of them”.