Mr Deputy Speaker,
Last July, the Prime Minister noted that ASEAN's per capita GDP today is around six thousand dollars — and that if it reaches ten thousand or more, it is, in his words, a complete game changer. A young region. A rising middle class. On our doorstep.
His observation is not new. The latest Economic Strategy Review report identifies Southeast Asia as an engine of growth. The Emerging Stronger Taskforce in 2021, under its "Stronger Together" pillar, had called for deepening of partnerships, especially with Southeast Asia. So did the Committee on the Future Economy in 2017, in the first of seven strategies. Every major economic blueprint of the past decade has named the region as key to Singapore’s future.
So the question is not whether Southeast Asia matters. We have consensus that it does. But what have we actually done about it?
This motion believes that an economy of the future that works for all includes an economic engine driven by Singaporeans and Singaporean capital venturing abroad.
The ESR is explicit about the latter and several Members have echoed it earlier. It asks that more of our own companies start, scale and succeed globally; it seeks deeper trade and supply chain links across the region; and it envisions a Singapore where capital is raised, structured, deployed and recycled across the region and the world. Around each sits a familiar architecture of support — grants and market-entry support for our companies, while public institutions co-invest, de-risk and finance their expansion, which draws private Singaporean capital out alongside them.
The Workers' Party supports all of this. But capital does not manage itself in a market it does not know. Someone has to be there to turn capital that has been deployed into capital that is productive. The more successful we are at sending capital into the region, the more pressing the question the ESR does not answer: who are we sending with it?
Two weekends ago, the Government unveiled the new SG Youth Plan - a separate blueprint for young Singaporeans, just a month after the ESR report, guided by the same conviction that our future lies in the region. It picks up on this thread that the ESR left hanging: it puts young Singaporeans and regional exposure at its centre and comes with some numbers.
It commits to expanding overseas exposure for young Singaporeans:
- 17,000 short-term exposure places a year by 2030, up from the current 9,000;
- 3,000 overseas internships in ASEAN, China and India, doubled from today’s 1,500.
It expands on what young Singaporeans say we want. 63% agree that regional work experience would help them advance faster, and half of us are willing to take up internships or jobs elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
Mr Speaker, this is encouraging. The appetite is there. If half of us are already willing to go, then what we should be looking at is whether the state invests in building us something worth going to, and something worth coming back to.
And on this note, I want to highlight three gaps.
The first is offtake.
The SG Youth Plan outlines a game plan focussed on supply. More trips, more internships, earlier access. Every one of its regional commitments is about sending young people out.
But what happens when we come home is the most decisive. Because if we return to a job market and a promotion board that treats six months in Jakarta as a detour rather than an asset, then only one obvious conclusion will be drawn: that such experiences are a penalty rather than a premium.
Do enough employers in Singapore value and reward regional experience? While I cannot speak for all employers, I would like to share a perspective from our largest employer - the Government.
In April, I filed a parliamentary question asking where government scholars have studied in the past decade. The answer I received was, and I quote:
Taking into account all Government scholarships (including PSC) over the last three years (i.e. 2023-2025), on an annual average basis:
- 49% of the recipients studied at our local Autonomous Universities,
- 30% in the United Kingdom,
- 15% in the United States of America and 6% in other countries.
6% for the entire rest of the world — the whole of ASEAN included. I also asked if there were minimum targets for scholars to study in non-English speaking countries and/or regions. The answer was no.
Now I am not doubting the quality of an Oxford, Cambridge or an Ivy League education. But these numbers mean that when we select and invest in young Singaporeans who will return to serve in the public service - a small group of whom might even take public office in the future - 10 out of 20 of them stay home, while another 9 go West.
If the Government is not prioritising and encouraging region-readiness in the public service, how can we ask young Singaporeans to believe that there is market demand for it?
The second gap is depth. Exposure does not equal fluency or capability.
17,000 young Singaporeans spending some time in the region is not 17,000 region-ready Singaporeans. The SG Youth Plan included the story of an ITE student who came home after being sent to Hanoi. She was more confident and eager to explore opportunities beyond our shores. But inspiration is only a beginning, it is not an outcome.
Real region-readiness is built over years, not weeks: the language learnt, the workings of the market understood from the inside, the network that answers when you call. Have we invested sufficiently in structures that will deepen it?
Key third languages offered to our students remain French, German, Japanese, Spanish — when blueprint after blueprint emphasise that our future lies with neighbours whose languages we do not teach. If we are serious, is it not time to ask whether Thai and Vietnamese also belong on that list? A short trip creates a memory. Language and cultural understanding are often the difference between a visitor and a partner.
The third — and perhaps most important – gap is whether and how any of this will be measured. Because we heard this aspiration before, especially in 2018 during our term as ASEAN Chair.
It was, appropriately, a year of speeches about how the region was our future and how the Government will help Singaporeans seize it.
In September 2018, in a written reply to a question on our progress in going regional, then Minister for Trade and Industry Chan Chun Sing set out what we were doing for talent.
- We had the Youth Talent Programme, which targeted sending 1,000 students each year for work opportunities in overseas markets.
- We had a Professional Conversion Programme for Southeast Asia Ready Talent, to reskill professionals for roles in the region.
- And there was an ASEAN Leadership Programme, to help senior business leaders understand and grow into Southeast Asian markets.
And what became of them? It appears that the first two, in one form or another, are still with us.
The Youth Talent Programme was folded into the Global Ready Talent Programme, which we were told supported 29,470 students between 2020 and 2024.
The Professional Conversion Programme was renamed and runs today as the Career Conversion Programme for Internationalisation Professionals.
But it is less clear what outcomes they have achieved eight years on.
The 29,470 figure for the Global Ready Talent Programme includes both domestic and overseas placements. It is only starting this April that local internship support has been discontinued. So how many actually went abroad? And of those who did — where did they go? How many of them went on to work in the region, or in a region-facing role?
For the Career Conversion Programme, how many professionals converted? From what sectors and into what roles? Has it helped their career trajectory?
What about the ASEAN Leadership Programme? How many leaders went through it? What became of their companies’ regional ambitions?
Mr Speaker, I have looked and struggled to find answers to the above questions from the public record. We have been generous in announcing schemes to build region-ready Singaporeans, but seemingly less willing to measure whether they worked. If yes, what worked well? If not, what fell short of expectations?
Some figures that I do have are from the ESR report: while half of Singaporeans express interest in working abroad, only 3% have actually done a stint of six months or more.
So with the new SG Youth Plan aspiring to 17,000 regional immersion opportunities for young Singaporeans, I ask: what has changed this time, so that in 2030 we will be able to say whether it worked? How will the Government track not just how many places were filled, but how many young people go on to work in region-facing roles or build a career in the region? Because if not, we are simply announcing a larger number to not measure.
And as we chair ASEAN again in 2027 — I hope we will not only articulate our ambition to plug into the region, but actively track and report on our investments in resourcing this ambition.
Mr Speaker, I want to now highlight a scheme – the Overseas Market Immersion Programme (OMIP) - that best captures how our ambition and strategy diverge.
The OMIP aims to give young Singaporeans real regional work experience, not just a taste of it. It works by helping employers send younger Singaporeans on structured postings abroad. It was launched in 2024 with the goal of 250 places over two years, significantly lower than the 2018 target of 1000 a year. To date, it has supported more than 180 professionals.
The SG Youth Plan will expand the OMIP.
- Not by scaling it so there are more places.
- Instead, it will widen the eligibility by dropping the two-year rule so that younger professionals may qualify. This means more will be eligible without a commitment to send more people.
- Widening the gate is not the same as sending more people through it. Eligibility without capacity is an invitation without a seat.
On behalf of fellow young Singaporeans, I have two asks:
One, complement the eligibility widening by scaling the number of available places.
Two, de-link it from employers. An employer-led scheme means a young Singaporean can only go if a company chooses to send them. It is dependent on the company having the HR capacity to manage an overseas posting.
Rather than run a people scheme through companies, let us focus it on the people instead. Fund the OMIP directly as a fixed-term stint, at fair wages, open to all graduates from our tertiary institutions. Select based on our graduates’ drive, curiosity and seriousness rather than our companies’ ability to shoulder the administrative burden of overseas postings.
We would not be the first to do this. France's Voluntariat International en Enterprise, also known as the International Corporate Volunteer Programme (VIE) proves that it is possible to do more, and even shows us how.
The VIE places more than 11,500 young people abroad every year. They can directly search and apply for open positions that range from 6 to 24 months on the VIE platform. When selected, these young people sign a contract with Business France, a state agency, instead of the host company. Business France looks after payroll, health coverage and social protection. The host company picks the candidate, supervises their work and pays the allowance to Business France. The state sits in the middle and absorbs the friction that neither an individual nor a small company can carry alone.
It works, and the French government has the numbers to prove it, because they measured it.
- 9 in 10 young persons on a VIE assignment find a job within six months of completing their stint.
- More than 7 in 10 come back fluent in the language where they were posted.
It is a scheme that produces more than inspiration. It kickstarts careers and builds capabilities – and tellingly, Singapore is among its top ten destinations. We are on the receiving end of another country’s talent pipeline but are struggling to build our own.
Now I am not saying that we copy the French VIE programme wholesale. But we should draw inspiration from its design: explore how the state can offer support for what individuals and small companies cannot do on their own.
And we should measure the outcomes of our programmes like France does for the VIE: publish not just how many places are filled, but how many are in a role with explicit regional mandate or impact two and five years after completing the OMIP stint.
Let us fund the appetite that young Singaporeans have, and measure outcomes rather than output.
And finally, we should go beyond the scheme and consider how we can tear down the wall that young Singaporeans find ourselves up against.
The SG Youth Plan will see the launch of a new programme called Adulting 101. It will teach us about CPF, public housing policy, marriage and parenthood. It correctly identifies the very things that weigh on a young person deciding whether to take an overseas work opportunity. But these are not just facts to be explained. They are structures that will need to change, for those who aspire to be regionally mobile.
A young Singaporean weighing three years in Jakarta or Ho Chi Minh is not only weighing salary against salary. She is weighing it against a BTO queue that rewards those who stay home; against CPF contributions a regional employer will not make; against the challenges of coming home to a housing and healthcare system she stepped out of. We have built a domestic architecture so finely tuned for staying home that leaving often means accepting penalties.
During his IPS lectures last year, Mr Philip Yeo acknowledged this wall. His account of his EDB years was blunt: send officers out while they are young and single, because by their mid-thirties, with children and a mortgage, it becomes too hard.
So developing region-ready Singaporeans means we should also consider how we can better support those who choose to go out. Explore how we can ensure that a regional posting does not complicate BTO opportunities and obligations, that children who go on post with their parents can have a seamless re-entry into school in Singapore. These cost only a fraction of the benefit they could bring, and could go a long way to quell a family’s hesitation.
Now, let me close by drawing these threads together.
The ESR speaks of creating good jobs and the SG Youth Plan echoes it with moves to help young Singaporeans land them. But for too long, we have pictured the good job as a high-value role inside an MNC that chose to base itself here. It is a good job that depends on someone else’s decision to come.
There is another kind of good job – one we seize because a field is taking shape around us, and Singapore is well placed to lead it: the growing social impact sector in Southeast Asia. And here, I declare my interest as a professional in the social impact space. As the public and private sectors in the region turn towards impact to close gaps in issues ranging from health and education to financial inclusion and climate resilience, someone has to convene players, develop benchmarks, and innovate for solutions. These are building blocks of a new pool of good jobs that a small country like Singapore can punch above our weight in. But it is also the kind of ambition that goes unrealised if we do not build a pipeline to seize it.
For years, our answer to the regional talent gap has been to draw in the region’s brightest, educate them here, and hope they stay. That worked well when we were the obvious best choice. But our region is catching up, and this advantage shrinks each year as our neighbours close the gap.
As Member Edward Chia said earlier, we must attract the best from the world while developing the best in Singaporeans. The talent we import appreciates for awhile then goes home. The Singaporean we equip to work in the region appreciates for a lifetime. A region-ready Singaporean holds capability that is hers – portable, not contingent on a company’s decision to base itself in Singapore.
We have been slow to build the bridge that carries our people out and quicker to build a wall to keep them home.
Next year, when we assume the Chairmanship of ASEAN, it will, once again and appropriately so, be a year of speeches about how the region is our future and how the Government will help Singaporeans seize it. I hope that this time around, we will not only name the potential of the region as we did in 2018, but also help more Singaporeans seize it.
I rise in support of the original motion tabled by my colleagues Kenneth Tiong and Associate Professor Jamus Lim.
