Mr Speaker,
The Economic Strategy Review is organised around workers adapting again and again. It proposes training, pathways and career bridges between jobs. It gives far less attention to the all-important first transition from education or National Service into stable work, and to whether young people get a fair start.
In February, during the Budget debate, I called this phenomenon the broken bottom rung—when young Singaporeans are unable to make that first meaningful step onto the career ladder.
The first job is where someone takes a chance on you. It is where you gain the experience that every subsequent employer expects you to have. A young person cannot create that opportunity alone. When firms stop taking chances on beginners, Singapore eventually stops producing experienced workers.
Today, I want to ask the Government a practical question:
If a young Singaporean has prepared for work, searched seriously and still cannot secure stable employment, what must change so that sustained effort can lead somewhere?
The gap behind the headline numbers
Today, most graduates still manage to find work. Among autonomous-university graduates in the labour force, those who secured employment of any kind within six months of completing their final examinations amounted to 88.9% of the 2025 cohort, a slight drop from 91.2% in 2024. So 8 out of 9 graduates found work last year, but that figure is a broad measure. It includes graduates in full-time permanent employment; but also those in part-time, temporary or freelance work; those who have accepted a job that begins later; and those taking steps to start a business.
However, those in full-time permanent employment amounted to 74.4% of the 2025 cohort, down from 79.4% the previous year. That means only 3 out of 4—down from 4 out of 5—found more stable, long term roles, and could start building an actual career.
I would not sound the klaxons just yet, but these are among several worrying signals, both in Singapore and from around the world, that it is getting harder for the youngest among us to find work.
The signals grow stronger when we look across different educational paths. Among surveyed fresh graduates from full-time external-degree programmes at private education institutions, 78.9% secured employment and 46.9% were in full-time permanent employment. Another 24.0% were in part-time or temporary work, including 9.7% who said this was involuntary. It is clearly not a bed of roses for everyone—the transition into stable work looks materially different depending on where you graduated.
Behind those figures are young people who have done what was asked of them and still cannot get started. I’ve heard from young graduates who told me about searches running into hundreds of applications. One submitted more than 500 applications over six months and received few interviews. Another submitted close to 200 applications in four months without securing an interview.
For these young people, the first transition meant repeated effort, very little response and no clear place to turn should their efforts repeatedly fail to net a reward.
A confluence of factors is likely driving the cooling job market for young Singaporeans. With the increased adoption of both Artificial Intelligence and ‘old-school’ technological and productivity advancements, a firm may make the entirely rational decision to automate the basic tasks once given to a junior employee. It may decide that training a beginner is too costly in today’s high cost environment when that person can leave after gaining experience.
Now take those same decisions and scale them across the economy, and we can start to see the problem. If every firm makes the same calculation, the economic engine gradually stops producing experienced workers. What works for one company’s balance sheet damages the national workforce.
The Government has introduced several measures to support the transition into work. The SG Youth Plan has introduced Job Tasters to help young people explore an occupation. Training helps them prepare. Matching services connect them to vacancies. Work-Study and Company-Led Training can combine a real job with structured workplace learning.
Each helps at a different stage. Taken together, however, a young person can still move from exposure to training to job matching without getting a fair start. Exposure is useful, but exposure is not employment.
That is the gap we must fill.
The Fair Start Promise
Mr Speaker, I propose a Fair Start Promise to all our youth—a national commitment to work towards a simple goal:
If you are a young Singaporean under 30 making the transition from education or National Service into working life, you will get a fair start, through stable employment or a proper paid career-building pathway.
That means rebuilding the broken bottom rung of the career ladder.
The establishment of the Skills and Workforce Development Agency, or the SWDA, gives us an important opportunity to make this Promise real. By bringing skills and employment under one roof, the government can now judge the whole transition by one outcome: whether young Singaporeans actually get a fair start.
The government should make fulfilling the Fair Start Promise a core mission of the SWDA, with staged targets that show whether Singapore is moving closer to the goal.
For the individual young Singaporean, targeted and individualised support from SWDA case officers should begin early. Six months into that transition is a sensible checkpoint at which to assess outcomes. Any young person still searching at that point should continue to receive active support. No one should be left to flounder alone.
But a national goal alone will not create opportunities. We must also create more genuine ways for young people to get their fair start.
First: open more ordinary entry-level jobs
First, we should open more ordinary entry-level jobs to capable beginners. Where an employer has real work and can develop a beginner through the ordinary course of employment, the priority should be a proper job.
My colleague Eileen Chong spoke during the SWDA Bill debate about the implementation gap in skills-based hiring. Singapore has produced toolkits and established institutions to promote it, but we still do not know clearly whether employers are changing how they hire or if they are lagging behind. She called for the Public Service to lead and for a published baseline tracking skills-based job postings by sector and employer size. I support those proposals.
I have previously proposed that the Careers and Skills Passport evolve from a digital filing cabinet into a dynamic, living credential. I now propose extending that idea: making it work better for hiring. The Passport already allows Singaporeans to share verified qualification, training and employment records with employers.
For a fresh graduate, however, that record will naturally be thinner. The SWDA should establish standards through which Institutes of Higher Learning and employers can verify substantial projects, internships, Work-Study learning stints, and other assessed competencies. Employers should then match that evidence to the actual skills required for the job and, where appropriate, let applicants demonstrate those skills through a structured practical assessment.
The Public Service should apply the same discipline to its own entry-level roles: identify what must genuinely be known on the first day, remove degree and prior-experience requirements that cannot be justified, and publish whether its hiring practices are changing. The government should lead by example.
These measures would improve the match between capable beginners and entry-level jobs that already exist. But matching alone cannot build the workplace experience that some jobs genuinely require. Singapore must also create more places where beginners can acquire it.
Second: build proper paid apprenticeships
Second, we should build proper paid apprenticeships. In some occupations, competence can only be built through sustained, supervised practice. Employers want experience because the work genuinely takes time to learn. Yet every firm has an incentive to wait for another firm to bear the cost of producing an experienced worker.
Singapore already has workplace programmes for young entrants. GRIT, for example, offers a three-to-six-month allowance-based traineeship and can provide useful short-term experience. But where an occupation requires sustained, supervised practice, we need a different route: a proper apprenticeship providing paid employment, CPF, structured training and portable competence.
That is why Singapore should build a national market for proper paid apprenticeships. The SWDA should identify occupations where employers need workers but beginners need sustained workplace training, and work with employers and sector bodies to expand apprenticeship places that meet a common quality floor.
That means recruiting firms and coordinating the teaching, assessment and supervision needed to build competence, while making sure every place provides enough real work.
Shared capacity is especially important for SMEs. A smaller firm may have valuable work but lack a training department, a full curriculum or enough varied tasks to train an apprentice alone. Sector bodies and consortia can provide common teaching, roving mentors and independent assessment, while coordinating rotations where these are needed to develop a full range of competence. Employers would still provide the job, wages, workplace supervision and their own investment.
The quality floor must be clear. A proper apprenticeship is paid employment. It should carry a contract of service, wages, CPF and ordinary workplace protections. The apprentice should perform productive work, learn through a structured plan and have a named mentor. Wages should progress with competence. Those skills should be recognised independently of any one employer and carry value elsewhere. The same employer need not guarantee permanent conversion, but before the pathway ends there should be a credible decision on conversion or progression.
The government should support the shared infrastructure and portable occupational training that individual firms are unlikely to provide alone. Employers must remain substantial investors from the first day. That is the bargain: Government solves the coordination problem; firms provide real work and help build the worker.
Proper apprenticeships are central to a fair start for young people, and the same principles have wider application across the economy. My colleague Mr Gerald Giam will speak next about their application in the skilled trades, where verified competence should lead to recognised mastery and real progression.
Third: create genuinely additional job opportunities
Third, the government should use its economic leverage to create genuinely additional job opportunities. Some employers have productive work but still hesitate to hire a beginner because of the initial wages, supervision and lower productivity. The government can change that decision selectively.
One lever is expanding targeted, temporary risk-sharing arrangements. Support should be available where an employer can show that it will create a genuine additional employee job or proper apprenticeship, and that the opening would not proceed on the same terms without help. The employer must contribute throughout and take responsibility for wages, CPF, real work, supervision and development.
Another lever is public procurement. Where workforce development is relevant to a substantial public contract, procuring agencies can require or recognise proportionate commitments to proper apprenticeships and genuine employee entry roles. The purpose is to connect public purchasing demand to the development of Singapore’s future workforce, without imposing a blanket quota on every contractor.
Both levers should face the same test: did public intervention change the employer’s decision and create a productive opportunity that would not otherwise have existed?
Public money should not pay employers to relabel planned vacancies, displace existing workers or cycle young people through temporary seats. Support should depend on additional work and real development. Money should be recovered where an employer misrepresents the role or fails to provide the job, wages, or development promised.
These measures will not eliminate every difficult transition. They can, however, increase the number of genuine first opportunities without compelling private employers to hire or manufacturing make-work in the economy.
Measure whether young people actually get started.
Finally, we must measure whether young people actually get that start. The Fair Start Promise should be judged by whether they enter stable employment or a proper paid career-building pathway and can build from it.
The SWDA should publish a baseline and staged targets for those outcomes. It should report whether employment lasts, whether job responsibilities and wages progress, and whether the results differ across groups.
The results must also show how many young people remain without stable employment or a proper paid career-building pathway at the critical six-month mark, for how long, and for what broad reasons. A youth should not disappear from the figures because a referral failed or a programme ended. Keeping those outcomes visible will show where vacancies, training capacity, or practical support remain inadequate.
A downturn may make progress towards the Fair Start Promise harder. That is when honest measurement matters most. It tells Parliament and the public how much opportunity has disappeared and whether the national response is strong enough.
The Fair Start Promise sets the national ambition. These three proposals are practical ways to move closer: open existing jobs to capable beginners with skills-based hiring, build proper paid apprenticeships, and create additional opportunities where public intervention changes the hiring decision. Transparent results will show where progress is being made and where the government must do more.
Conclusion
Mr Speaker, the Fair Start Promise asks something of everyone. Young people must prepare, search earnestly, and engage with suitable opportunities. Employers must provide real work and invest in beginners. The government must build the conditions in which sustained effort can lead somewhere.
The Government must not stand aside when every employer waits for someone else to provide the first chance. It must not let young people disappear between programmes and institutions.
That is how a more equal and inclusive economy gives every young Singaporean a fair chance to begin building a working life.
Thank you, Mr Speaker.
