Mr Speaker, I speak today in support of the original motion filed by my honourable friends, A/P Jamus Lim and Mr Kenneth Tiong.
The Economic Strategy Review recognises that the global economy is changing in ways that are structural rather than cyclical.
My speech will focus on the Thrusts 6 and 7 of the ESR. While their broad aims are laudable, I hope to advance some different recommendations for consideration, in the shared hope and spirit of better preparing and protecting our Singaporean workers.
I will frame my suggestions through three questions.
The first question concerns the journey. What is the journey for Singaporean workers who find themselves displaced in the workforce, or at risk of being made obsolete?
The second question is about the destination. What is the destination for those who undertake skills training or upgrading? And how can we ensure that such re-training or upskilling results in a job on the other side?
The third question ties the previous two together. What is the proof that our continuing education system actually works?
The Journey
Mr Speaker, I begin with my first question: what is the journey like for Singaporean workers who undertake reskilling or retraining opportunities? More importantly, how can we make sure that these workers can, and do, benefit from these opportunities, and what can be done to make the journey easier for them?
My answer is twofold.
One is to offer a robust safety net so that workers, especially those who are displaced, can pursue re-training and re-skilling opportunities without anxiety or worry.
Two is to unlock sources of funding for those who may wish to pursue deeper mid-career upskilling.
Why Singaporean workers need and deserve a robust safety net
Sir, Singaporean workers deserve a robust safety net. Upskilling and retraining sounds good in the abstract as a response to job displacement. But we have to remember that Singaporean workers are not video game characters progressing through a skill tree to get an “achievement unlocked”.
To workers made redundant, or on the verge of losing their jobs, upskilling and re-training may not sound like “solutions” in the immediate moment, but rather as another source of stress and uncertainty.
Let us not understate the psychological distress and desperation that precarious employment can cause. Other than anxiety and disappointment, workers can also feel shame and embarrassment, especially if they are breadwinners with children or elderly depending on them.
We must thus manage workforce transformations and transitions with sensitivity.
We need our Singaporean workers to feel secure and have confidence that they can and will overcome an employment disruption if and when they face one.
And we need affected workers to be confident that they have the full backing of society and the Government as they endeavour to overcome this setback.
Sir, that sense of security, hope, and confidence can only come by offering our workers the protection of a robust safety net, namely through (i) mandatory retrenchment benefits, and (ii) a universal Redundancy Insurance scheme.
Mandatory retrenchment benefits
Mr Speaker, the ESR in Thrust 6 calls for “earlier intervention in retrenchment support” (p. 59).
Early intervention makes sense. However, I want to ask whether this alone is sufficient, or even fair, for the affected workers, who have sometimes contributed years of service.
Currently, employers are encouraged to abide by the Tripartite Advisory on responsible retrenchment. As a result, retrenchment benefits remain at the discretion of the respective employers.
This is a policy choice that unfairly disadvantages our workers and leaves them vulnerable. To me, this is wrong. We must protect hardworking Singaporeans and legislate mandatory retrenchment benefits.
Redundancy insurance v. Jobseekers Support Scheme
Sir, I now turn to another concern raised in Thrust 6 of the ESR about strengthening support for our Professionals, Managers, and Executives (PMEs).
We believe that a Redundancy Insurance scheme offers better protection for all Singaporean workers, including our PMEs.
In contrast to the SkillsFuture Jobseeker Support scheme, our proposal is meant to be universal and funded by joint contributions from both employers and employees, amounting to a combined 0.1 percent of the worker’s monthly salary.
And because every worker pays into it, every worker will be eligible to benefit from it.
The basic idea is for each retrenched worker to receive 40 per cent of their last drawn salary, which will be further capped at 40 per cent of Singapore's prevailing median income. These payouts will last up to six months at most.
Sir, one of the advantages of our Redundancy Insurance scheme is that the payouts are straightforward.
Workers will not have to go through an application process, or face an agonising wait about the outcome, or stress themselves out further about what they should do if their application was rejected.
Our proposal offers displaced workers the assurance, peace of mind, and financial buffer to properly re-skill and seek better job-fit, since the worker would not need to jump at the first offer that comes along. This will also reduce the prospect of under-employment.
Mr Speaker, at this point, I can already hear murmurs about “moral hazard” from honourable colleagues across the aisle. I want to reassure them that our Redundancy Insurance features the following 4Cs to address this.
The 4Cs are coverage, conditionality, caps, and cushion. First, coverage is restricted only to cases of involuntary redundancy, thus eliminating the concern that workers may quit in order to collect benefits.
Second, conditionality: payouts for the second and subsequent months will be made conditional on the individuals’ job searching or retraining efforts.
Third, caps: the payouts are modest and limited by a “double 40” cap — i..e., only 40% of last drawn salary, which is also further subjected to a cap at 40% of median income.
Lastly, cushion: these payouts are time-limited and not meant to fully replace lost income. Rather, it is intended to merely cushion the harsh impact of retrenchment, and provide a semblance of security and assurance the worker and his or her family and dependents in their immediate future.
Beyond the 4Cs, Mr Speaker, let me make a more fundamental point about the Redundancy Insurance scheme.
Here, I’m glad to see that the Prime Minister is here in the House because he would perhaps best appreciate how our universal Redundancy Insurance scheme can reflect and foster a We First spirit: by pooling our resources collectively and engaging in risk sharing, it is a reminder that all of us Singaporeans are in this together, and that we mutually help and support each other when things are difficult.
Supporting deep reskilling pathways: interest-free education loans and using CPF OA savings for master’s degrees
Sir, I return back to the question about the journey: what else can we do to better support workers who are re-training or upskilling?
And what I want to suggest here is especially pertinent for Singaporeans who have spent some time in the workforce, and may now want to upskill in a major, and deeper, way.
This could mean taking on a postgraduate degree. In doing so, workers would then gain the qualifications and competencies needed to either value-add to their current work, or to even pivot to new industries.
However, such deep upskilling is often more demanding, very time- and energy-intensive, and involves a longer-term commitment. It can also be financially exacting.
Here, I am in agreement with the ESR’s diagnosis and recommendation in Thrust 7, which calls for “expanding funding support to cover a broader range of deeper reskilling pathways, including post-graduate programmes offered by IHLs”.
I have two specific proposals in this regard.
First, the Government should directly offer mid-career Singaporeans undertaking a post-graduate degree with access to education loans that are interest-free at least for the duration of their course, and with repayments to start at a modest rate before progressively increasing after a certain period.
What I have in mind is something like the Mendaki Study Loans, which has a repayment arrangement that scales up over a period of time.
Second, the Government should expand the CPF Education Loan Scheme to cover part-time and full-time master’s programmes at our IHLs. This is currently not possible.
Finding the funding for postgraduate studies is often a challenge for many working professionals. Yet, postgraduate degrees remain useful in improving employability. For instance, employers sometimes reduce the years of working experience needed for applicants with a postgraduate degree.
Sir, these suggestions partly emerge from my own experience of pursuing a mid-career switch a few years ago. I left the Public Service to pursue a postgraduate J.D. programme at SMU to become a lawyer.
The temporary transition back to being a full-time student was difficult, not least due to the loss of a stable income for the three years of the J.D. programme.
However, securing an interest-free education loan from Mendaki was helpful for me.
Also, while being a J.D. student, I was in a slightly better financial place as a result of holding a master’s in sociology. That enabled me to secure part-time employment teaching at SIM, which helped with my day-to-day expenses.
Today, re-training and upskilling is something unavoidable for the Singaporean worker. However, we in this House would do well to recognise that the process of retraining, and especially deeper upskilling, involves opportunity and real costs, some of which can and should be alleviated.
The Destination
Mr Speaker, I now arrive at my second question: the destination.
Training, by itself, is not an economic outcome, and obtaining a certificate does not necessarily translate into a livelihood. If retraining ends with the worker returning home to search job portals alone, then we have merely replaced one form of insecurity with another.
I am thus encouraged by the opportunity presented last month by the merger of SkillsFuture Singapore and Workforce Singapore into a single statutory board.
The Skills and Workforce Development Agency (SWDA) has the potential to serve as a new, integrated system where workers can be supported actively by the State throughout the entire process of displacement, re-training, job matching and re-employment.
I believe that this is in line with the recommendation in Thrust 7 of the ESR.
As such, the SWDA should avoid merely becoming a larger training administrator. Instead, it should be connecting together employers, training providers, and workers so that retraining culminates in a real opportunity for employment.
The SWDA should serve as a premier one-stop employment centre where every involuntarily unemployed jobseeker can be assigned with a dedicated caseworker.
Jobseekers will meet with the caseworker for one-on-one guidance on the job search process.
After a careful consideration of the jobseekers’ circumstances, skills and experience, as well as the expected vacancies in the job market, the caseworker can then either match the jobseekers to available jobs, or else recommend retraining or upskilling courses that can prepare these jobseekers to transition into another role.
To properly fulfill this bridging and matching function, SWDA will have to do two things in tandem: one, tracking the macro-developments in the jobs sector; and two, ensuring that its programme offerings are fit for purpose.
The first task is for the SWDA to have a good understanding of the ever-evolving needs and demands of the job market, so that they can better match or train jobseekers for these jobs.
Here, SWDA can work with employers to understand which sectors are expanding, which firms are expected to have vacancies over the next six to twelve months, and which industries face persistent worker shortages.
The second task requires the SWDA to build a culture of rigorous evaluation so that taxpayers’ monies are funding courses and training programmes that actually provide good employment outcomes for workers, or at the very least, provide skills needed by the industry.
For example, in many industries, there are companies that compete commercially but require many of the same foundational competencies. SWDA can work with industry partners to build training programmes that focus on sector-wide skills during the first few months, followed by a shorter company-specific immersion.
SWDA should also work with industry professionals to design training curricula for workers. It should regularly collect employers' requirements across each industry, or perhaps even receive curricula proposals from these employers, as suggested before by two of my honourable friends, Mr Gerald Giam and A/P Jamus Lim.
Training providers should then demonstrate how their own programmes meet these industry-identified needs. And if this is not the case already, industry representatives should sit on curriculum steering committees.
SkillsFuture providers should also be governed by tougher quality assurance frameworks, with frequent audits of providers and trainers. There should also be industry input on the assessment standards for SkillsFuture courses.
Every SkillsFuture programme, from curriculum to assessment, should require sign-off from three stakeholders: an employer or industry representative, the Government, and the training provider.
Finally, SWDA should work with employers to provide probationary opportunities for successful graduates from SkillsFuture programmes. This will demonstrate that these are solid training programmes that can prepare workers to enter new industries or new jobs.
I believe that a new SWDA can best serve our workforce by becoming the national convenor matching displaced workers, employers and training institutions into a single, coherent system of retraining and rehiring.
The SWDA can then develop a niche in creating the “career bridges” which the ESR talks about in Thrust 6 — those “structured pathways” for at-risk workers to gain employment in more resilient occupations.
The Proof
Mr Speaker, my third question is on the proof.
How can we be confident that our system of continuing education actually works?
Where is the evidence to tell us that our training programmes actually succeed?
We spend billions of dollars supporting workforce development, but surprisingly little outcome data enters the public domain.
We know, for example, that around 55 percent of previously unemployed trainees who participated in the SkillsFuture Career Transition Programme found new jobs within six months.
But we do not know which courses perform better at helping trainees find new jobs, which providers consistently deliver stronger outcomes, whether wages rise after retraining, and whether workers remain employed one year later.
I understand that Skillsfuture, and continuing education more generally, should not only be narrowly evaluated in terms of employment outcomes. SkillsFuture also serves the purposes of enrichment and lifelong learning, which is why, as one of my honorable colleagues shared with me, even her 88-year-old mother receives SkillsFuture credit!
However, Mr Speaker, the point remains: if the Government is primarily relying on SkillsFuture as the platform to deliver workforce retraining and upskilling, then surely our evaluation of SkillsFuture and its offerings must reflect that priority.
The Government should thus publish more metrics to help workers assess the effectiveness of specific SkillsFuture programmes in relation to employment prospects.
For example, for each provider and course, we should publish how many trainees found new jobs within six months, and the average wages of these new jobs.
The availability of such data would transform accountability throughout the training ecosystem. Providers would be forced to compete on outcomes, rather than marketing, and workers would make better-informed decisions before going for training.
Government funding should then flow towards programmes that demonstrably succeed.
The ROI: why we invest in the upskilling of our workers
Mr Speaker, one last point on why we invest in the upskilling of our workers.
Singapore has built one of the world’s most generous systems of continuing education.
Without a doubt, the Government has invested significantly in our people.
But, as always is the case with Government expenditure, where the money goes and how it is spent matters as much as how much is spent.
The recently-released Report of the Auditor-General raises questions about whether the money has been fruitfully used.
The AGO flagged some issues with the Career Conversion Programme (CCP) and Mid-Career Pathways Programme (MCPP).
In page 65 of the Report, the AGO found that 6 groups of 30 related entities had engaged in patterns that suggested, and I quote, “potential gaming of the programmes to maximise grant claims, rather than genuine training initiatives”, end quote.
While I understand that Workforce Singapore has addressed some of these findings, my concern is about the vulnerabilities in the system that can be exploited.
The Government must remain vigilant in detecting any abuse of the system and plugging these gaps, so as to ensure that public monies can deliver genuine training of our workforce.
Because every dollar diverted or wasted is a dollar not spent to re-train or upskill a worker to stay employable.
And we must ensure that the taxpayers’ money we spend to support reskilling and career conversion should produce genuine workforce outcomes and meaningfully help displaced workers rebuild their careers.
Conclusion
To recap the proposals in my speech: (i) legislating mandatory retrenchment benefits, (ii) implementing universal redundancy insurance, (iii) introducing interest-free education loans and allowing CPF to be used for post-graduate study, (iv) consolidating SWDA into a one-stop shop for employment and upskilling with dedicated caseworkers, (v) collaborating more closely with industry partners to finetune SkilsFuture offerings and curricula, and (vi) publishing more public outcome data by provider and course.
Mr Speaker, the ESR rightly observes that “Singapore’s greatest asset has always been its people”. And to maximise our competitive advantage, we must enable Singaporeans to move confidently from one stage of their working lives to another.
Ideally, the worker should begin retraining or upskilling with a clear idea of the destination ahead. He or she should be able to see, right from the start, a credible “career bridge”, rather than resting on some vague hope that re-training will lead to some hazy notion of somewhere better.
With that, I reiterate my support for the original motion.
