Mr Speaker,
Much of the conversation about workforce development and transformation has come from individuals who are senior enough to shape their organisations, or by economists and academics looking at the workforce from the macro perspective.
Today, I would like to offer a view from the middle. I speak as a millennial worker who has spent almost nine years in the workforce. I have spent my working life so far as an individual contributor – someone who implements strategic decisions more than I make them. A team member who is good at her job, but rarely at the table where such decisions are made.
From where I stand, a lot of what workers have heard about workforce transformation has been directed at us. [Pause] We are told: embrace new technology. Learn, use, master. Don’t let anxiety hold you back. And I understand why – workers are the ones whose livelihoods are on the line. But workers are only one side of the transformation equation. So today, I want to talk about how the new Skills and Workforce Development Agency must also hold employers accountable.
I have three asks.
Job Redesign
Mr Speaker, my first ask is that the Agency makes job redesign a genuine priority.
Currently, “job redesign” is buried in a sub-clause under Section 5 of the Bill, which outlines the new Agency’s functions. It is defined as “the review and reallocation by an employer of duties and tasks among employees”. I looked up where this definition could have come from. It appears to have been taken word for word from the 2003 Workforce Singapore Agency Act.
Is a 23-year old definition still adequate for the age of AI?
Job redesign today cannot simply mean reallocating tasks between employees. It must ask a more fundamental question - given what technology can do now, what should people be doing instead? It is the difference between a company that adopts AI by simply layering it onto existing workflows and hoping for the best, versus one that considers which parts of a job can be transformed, automated or augmented by technology, and then deliberately shaping the human role into something more valuable, purposeful and sustainable.
Early data shows a problem. A recent MOM survey showed that the majority of Singapore companies (71.5%) have not adopted AI. Among the 28.5% that have begun using AI, meaningful integration remains limited. For companies that have started or planned to support the use of AI for employees, their focus remains overwhelmingly on training and upskilling (73.3% / 46.6%) and provision of AI tools and subscriptions (63.3% / 41.1%), rather than job redesign and career progression (22.5% / 11.4%).
If we invest in upskilling workers but do not change what they come back to – the same job scope, the same workflow, plus a backlog of work that accumulated while they were upskilling – then we have not transformed anything.
So I ask the Minister: Will the new Agency be resourced and empowered to drive job redesign at the scale that Singapore genuinely needs?
Skills-based hiring
Mr Speaker,
My second ask is for the Agency to close the implementation gap in skills-based hiring.
We have invested significantly in SkillsFuture. Workers have put in time, effort and money into acquiring new skills. But too often, they return to a job market only to be filtered out – because they do not have the right paper qualifications or past job titles.
The evidence tells us that we have a challenge with employer behaviour. Singapore ranked 12th out of 30 countries in the inaugural OECD-IAL Skills-First Readiness and Adoption Index published last year. Where we fall short is not in worker willingness to upskill. It is in employer adoption of skills-first hiring practices. Only 21% of Singapore employers saw removing degree requirements and adopting skills-first hiring as a promising way to increase talent availability. And when it comes to employers who would not prioritise a university degree when assessing candidates’ skills, Singapore ranked last.
The Index findings confirm what a 2023 BCG skills-based hiring trend report had already shown. While the US, UK and Australia had all reduced degree requirements in hiring for university-level jobs between 2017 and 2022, Singapore moved in the opposite direction – degree requirements increased by 5.3% in the same period.
And here is what is more concerning. While much has been said about making skills-based hiring a priority – and I recognise the groundwork done by introducing the Skills-Based Hiring Handbook and establishing the Centre for Skills-First Practices – it is unclear whether any of this has materially changed how Singapore employers hire.
I filed a PQ last November asking what percentage of Public Service jobs waive formal academic qualifications and employ skills-based assessment as the primary hiring criterion. The answer I received was that the Public Service - our largest employer - [quote] “do not track the number of job postings that do or do not include formal academic requirements in their criteria”. I also did not get a direct response to the second part of my question about targets and timelines established to accelerate skills-based hiring across agencies.
Mr Speaker, if our largest employer cannot tell us if it is moving in the right direction, how can other Singapore employers be persuaded to do the same?
Will the new Agency work with the Public Service to lead the adoption of skills-based hiring across public sector jobs? Having already released relevant toolkits to support employers, will the new Agency now commit to tracking and posting an index on the adoption of skills-based hiring by Singapore employers? This could begin with a baseline that tracks the proportion of skills-based jobs postings, broken down by sector and employer size. Singaporeans should see, year-on-year, whether hiring culture is genuinely shifting, or whether we still are, as the OECD index found, bound by a stubborn paper ceiling.
Measuring What Matters: Outcomes, Not Outputs
My third and final ask, Mr Speaker, is perhaps the most important: measure what genuinely changes in workers’ lives, not just what the Agency has done.
Over the years, we have become very good at counting output. How many individuals assisted. How many programmes launched. How many events conducted and persons engaged. These numbers appear in annual reports, announced with pride. But does a completed course mean a worker’s prospects have actually improved? Does the formation of a Company Training Committee mean a company has genuinely transformed?
I want to propose a simple but demanding shift: from measuring output to tracking outcomes.
- At the individual worker level, track wage progression, job retention. Track what proportion of SkillsFuture credits were used for training that resulted in demonstrable career benefit. Not just uptake of SkillsFuture programmes, but the programmes’ impact.
- At the employer level, track whether companies are actually redesigning jobs and seeing productivity gains, not just sending staff for courses to access grants. Track if companies are hiring differently, valuing demonstrated skills. Are they also less likely to conduct retrenchments because they invested in their people before a downturn? These are harder to measure. They require follow-through and some courage in data collection. The Agency should also publish anonymised employer-level outcome data by sector and by company size. Let Singaporeans see who is genuinely transforming and who is performing transformation.
- At the workforce level, track whether anxiety is coming down and resilience is going up. Track whether wages and productivity are moving in tandem. Are benefits of transformation reaching workers across the income and skill spectrum, or whether they are concentrating – as they often do – at the top.
I hope the new Agency’s annual report will, from day one, commit to tracking these outcomes rather than cataloging programmes launched. If we cannot measure it, we cannot improve it.
Conclusion
Mr Speaker,
I want to close where I started – as a Singaporean worker watching this transformation unfold from the middle.
Most of us are willing to learn. Some of us have already tried. What we need now is not more inspiration or encouragement. We need a system that moves employers and workers forward together and that holds both sides to account. One where upskilling leads somewhere. Where hiring is fair. And where success is measured not in programmes run, but in lives that have durably improved.
The new Skills and Workforce Development Agency carries a mandate that workers have heard versions of before. That is precisely why it should do things differently.
Mr Speaker, I support the Bill.
议长先生，我支持【技能与劳动力发展局】的设立，并希望这个【新设立的法定机构】能从三方面着手，以大胆和全新的方式操作，来应对世界的变化和人工智能浪潮，确保国人不会掉队。
首先，我们需要将【重新设计工作】作为一个优先考量。人力部最新发布的调查报告显示，已经落实或打算采用人工智能的企业中，更多关注的是内部培训或提升技能，而不是重新设计工作。
- 这反映的问题是，雇主会将人工智能融入现有的工作流程中，但一定会以员工的福利为出发点，让他们未来的工作更有价值、更具意义，并且更可持续。
- 对此我希望当局投入更多的资源，加大对【重新设计工作】的关注并将它作为提升劳动队伍竞争力的优先考量。
第二，我希望当局能够改善本地【以技能为主招聘模式】不足的现象。许多调查发现，大部分的新加坡雇主还是专注在求职者的学历和文凭，而并非技能。
- 政府作为最大的雇主之一，也未开始追踪公共服务署的招聘广告中，有多少列(lie4)出或没列出学历要求这一方面的数据。议长先生，连政府也未明确开始朝这个方向前进，那我们如何鼓励更多雇主也那么做呢？
- 我希望政府在带领私人企业提倡以【以技能为主招聘模式】的同时，也能同步发布相关数据，例如追踪多少雇主采用了这个模式进行招聘。
第三，且更重要的是，我们在提供数据衡量成果时，应该从国人的角度出发探讨这对他们的实质成效。
- 对员工而言，我们应该衡量的是：使用【技能创前程培训补助】参加课程后是否有改善他们的就业，例如薪金有没有增长，而并非停留在多少人参加了计划或使用津贴。
- 在雇主方面，我们也应该追踪他们在重新设计工作岗位后，生产力是否提高，而不单是看他们是否有让员工参加培训课程，以获取津贴。
新机构的设立正是一个新的起点，我希望我们也能借此从员工的角度出发，为新加坡就业与劳动力的未来写上新篇章。
