Remarks by President Tharman at SkillsFuture Fellowship and SkillsFuture Employer Award

Minister Chan Chun Sing, MOS Gan Siow Huang, Mr Tan Kok Yam, CEO of SkillsFuture Singapore and everyone who’s here, particularly the individuals and enterprises who are role models on this whole SkillsFuture journey. I'm very happy to be here because I think these are amongst our most important national awards. The recognition (that) we are giving the individuals and companies today is not just for themselves, it’s actually for everyone to see. For everyone to be inspired by.

SkillsFuture journey was embarked on about a decade ago, in 2014. And we had a whole slew of measures and subsidies that were announced, including the SkillsFuture Credits in 2015. So we're about a decade into this whole journey.

I think we are achieving significant progress. We’re still not anywhere near where we’d like to be, but we are achieving significant progress. You can see the culture changing. You can see the culture changing within our firms, certainly amongst our unions whom I’d say are foremost in pushing this culture. And even in the community, the CDCs and other community organisations are pushing this. Slowly the culture is changing in Singapore, towards recognising lifelong learning as part of a way of life. Not something imposed on us, not something that we have to do as a burden, but a part of our way of life in Singapore. That shift is taking place. That culture is a very important part of the journey.

But equally what we're seeing is many more role models. This is the seventh year in which we're having the SkillsFuture Fellowships. Each year we have several role models, and now we have employers as well who are being recognised as role models. And as you get more role models, there are more people who are observing them as well - at the workplace or in competing firms. And it sends the signal. So, I really want to commend each of the 36 award recipients this year - 12 SkillsFuture Fellows and 24 SkillsFuture employer awardees, for being role models, and helping to spread this culture, this culture that takes us on the journey.

I'll mention just two examples. It’s always hazardous, by the way, to pick one or two examples. I'm not trying to say that these examples are above the rest, but these examples exemplify what each of our award recipients has been about.

The first example is one of today's award winners for the SkillsFuture Fellowships. And that is 52-year-old Mr Low Eng Keat. Mid-career, middle aged, and Eng Keat epitomises what this is all about because from the very start of his career - he began more than 30 years ago in Mediacorp in the lighting department - from the very start he's been improving his skills and moving up the ranks. And in the work and business of lighting, most of it has been on the job. The technologies keep changing, the apps and the products keep changing, you just have to keep learning. That's exactly what Eng Keat has been doing. He kept learning, kept rising through the ranks and he's now a senior manager leading a whole team of lighting designers. And he also, impressively, completed a part-time Bachelor’s of Science programme in digital media at SUSS just last year. What I found very interesting also is that Eng Kiat has taken very seriously sharing his knowledge with others. In fact, he completed an Advanced Certificate in Training and Assessment, which is helping him to now conduct training for others on lighting modules and other areas - both for his colleagues, for poly students and for others. So he's really a role model in both senses - kept improving on the job and improving his career prospects, but also training others.

A second role model is in enterprise. We just saw a set of enterprises in the video. And the one that I'll highlight is Boxgreen. I was really impressed when I read about Boxgreen. It’s an SME, they develop and sell healthy snacks. But what's interesting is their real commitment to their employees - each employee gets 10 paid training lead days each year, plus sponsorship for the training programmes they attend. And their HR system has been geared towards continuous training, which means that supervisors themselves develop or co-develop learning strategies which each employee, the employees themselves are empowered to set their own development goals. The HR system has been designed so as to recognise and reward skills improvement.

That's a very important objective in Singapore - rejigging our HR systems, to focus less on the entry qualifications, and more on continuous improvement of skills, including the certifications and other forms of recognition that come with attaining different levels of skills. And one more thing they’ve found is that productivity has gone up, self-confidence and morale have gone up. And as the CEO puts it, people like to come to work. That is the bottom-line - people really like to come to work. And that's what we must achieve across our entire economy of enterprises.

So these are good examples and I know there are many other examples. But I would say progress is still uneven, and we're still early on that journey of creating a culture amongst employers, including employers who are trying to get by day to day, don't have time to focus very much on the future, don’t have a large workforce and don't have much fat. For that very large group of smaller enterprises especially, those who are trying to just get by day to day, and survive and make some profit, we've got to make it easier for them. Easier for them to invest in their workers, take advantage of government subsidies and support, take advantage of all the other collective efforts of our industry federations and trade associations, so that they can also have their employees rise together with the rest. So we have good role models for shifting the culture, but we still have some way to go.

When we embarked 10 years ago on SkillsFuture, we knew it was going to be a central economic and social strategy. And you'll notice that in the Forward Singapore plans that were just unveiled, SkillsFuture was a key pillar, a key pillar for our future social compact. And that's not surprising.

I would say, frankly, that what we expected about 10 years ago, the challenges we expected for our workforce and our economy, have been exceeded by what has actually been happening. Everything we expected to happen has happened. But it's happening at a faster pace and will have I think the greater impact than most could have imagined 10 years ago.

If we think about technology, we all knew about the rapid pace of technological change. But what's happening is not just that continuous change in technologies, continuous automation. I think we're seeing a sea change coming now. It's really a phase shift, where you have a whole generation of far more powerful automation technologies and artificial intelligence that are going to impact a much broader segment of the workforce - in fact, I would say the majority of the workforce in the years to come. We cannot tell exactly which jobs and skills are going to be redundant, exactly which jobs and skills are going to be new, but we know for sure that most jobs are going to be affected, and most jobs can also be improved using these new technologies.

So it requires accelerating our efforts, and intensifying our efforts - not just in digital technologies, but more generally. The technological curve is not linear, it's actually accelerating. We've known also, of course, that we're going to become an older society -  that is the most predictable fact. Our median age of our local workforce is now mid-40s, (in) 10 years’ time will be closer to 50.  

But importantly, we are (not just) getting older, but our whole lives are being extended and people want to stay productive for longer. Staying productive without it being an exhausting job or a job that tires one out, or a job that earns no respect. Everyone wants to stay active in the workforce in a way that is respected and valued, and that they get satisfaction from. And that's an opportunity - to have longer work lives that are productive and satisfying. That's the second very important objective. The first dimension was adjusting to technological change and taking advantage of it. The second is adjusting to the fact that we're all getting older, and taking advantage of the fact that we've got longer lives.

The third challenge, and opportunity, which we've always had in mind is shifting our culture. Developing that culture of solidarity is itself a national objective, a culture where we all advance together. And a culture where we value people based not on where they started, but based on whether they are on the journey towards acquiring mastery. Acquiring mastery like all our SkillsFuture Fellowship award winners. Everyone who's on that journey deserves to be credited and respected for what they are doing. And that's a shift in our culture. Looking at people not based on where they start, or where they are in a hierarchy of jobs within the firm, or hierarchy of pay, but whether they are on a journey towards mastery, and recognising and rewarding that mastery. None of this comes automatically.

One of the things I worry most about is the fact that just like education, advancing through skills in life can be either a source of inequality or an equaliser. We know that education used to be a great equaliser. It was a real equaliser for a few generations of Singaporeans. Now, we are working very hard through MOE and our schools and all our tertiary institutions to make sure that it remains an equaliser, and where you start off in life doesn’t dictate where you end up at age 18 or 24.  We all take it very seriously  - starting much earlier in life, in fact even before the kids go to preschool, intervening to help those who have less, who come from more humble backgrounds, intervening through KidStart, strengthening the preschool system, and of course, our continuous improvement with the whole school system. Smaller classes, better teachers, all the improvements we're making are important. If you just leave it all to families and individuals, those who are better off and those who are parents are better educated will be able to provide more for their children than the rest. Our whole national system aims at being an equaliser.

Likewise, in lifelong learning, without a national system, if we just leave it to the market of enterprises, and we leave it to individuals, it can very well become a source of inequality. For those who already have it move further up; professionals engage more in lifelong learning than ordinary workers, the blue-collar workers and also ordinary white-collar workers. This is in fact what happens naturally, in every society, if we just leave it to the market. Many blue-collar workers are quite tired at the end of the day or end of the week, and everyone has responsibilities to manage, particularly family responsibilities. So it's not easy. And you find one society after another, it’s the professionals are better educated, who take even more advantage of continuous learning and move up further. So this is what again we want to avoid. We want to avoid lifelong learning becoming a source of inequality, and make it instead an equaliser, and that is what we are going to do in Singapore - an equaliser across the workforce. And an equaliser across firms so that small firms are not disadvantaged compared to large firms, which is again what will happen if we just leave it to the market.

That's what we have to do. It requires a national system so that we all rise together, and we become a more resilient economy and a more resilient society. If it’s only about some doing better than others, that's good for them, but everyone is losing out if you do not have a more resilient economy and a more resilient society. Everyone including the professionals and those who are better educated, including the largest firms, will be worse off if you do not have that overall resilience in our community, in our society. So that's what we are seeking to achieve. It's a large-scale endeavour, in Forward Singapore, and in particular through SkillsFuture, and we have to put our all into this endeavour.

There are real opportunities for Singapore to do this very well. We can do this very well. Having a national ecosystem that achieves reach throughout the workforce and across enterprises. Achieving that reach without reducing quality. That's the challenge every country faces. You could simply expand reach, but it'd be a very thin reach without real quality. So achieving that reach but doing it with quality for the individual worker and the individual firms so they see it as relevant, they can really improve their careers or their enterprise productivity.

That's a real challenge that requires a national system – a national system of funding, both public and private, and in our case with very significant public funding. And you know that as part of Forward Singapore, the Government has announced that it intends to provide a major boost in SkillsFuture funding for mid-career(s) in particular – a very significant boost that will be announced later on.

But it also requires very extensive coordination, because it’s about a whole team. This is actually far more complex than organising an education system of schools, far more complex because it's diverse - it's diverse across enterprises, sectors, even different individuals having different work experiences, which they bring into this. So it requires close coordination.

That means government, businesses, unions, educational institutions, taking lifelong learning very seriously. And it’s not just institutions, it's actually a whole team of individuals in our society. The lecturers. The experienced industry practitioners who become trainers not just in their own firms, but more broadly. The coaches within the firm, within our industry organisations and even in the community, career coaches and skills coaches. The team leaders on the job and colleagues on the job motivating each other. At the end of the day, it is a whole team of individuals, not just institutions, and we all have to work together so that we rise together, and everyone is better. That's our aim.

And I should mention that as part of the team of individuals, HR practitioners are extremely important in motivating workers, and devising a system of recognition and rewards for those who are acquiring skills.

So that's our broad orientation, develop a national system, not just leaving it to the market, not just having sporadic recognition or awards, but developing this whole national system. It will take time for us to get to where we want to be, but we are well on our way. You all take credit for the progress that has been made.

But secondly, I think we will also want to do more for those who are not in the workforce continually. Women in particular often have segmented work lives, not continuous. When you take some time off to raise the family. There are also many individuals, men and women who take time off to be caregivers. And we have to think about how that period out of work can also be a period of learning, so that they are able to come back into the workforce eventually, not feeling disadvantaged, but feeling reinvigorated and reskilled. That itself is an opportunity in Singapore. We have a tight labour market. We are not growing our workforce very much in future, but we still have significant numbers of Singaporeans who because of circumstances and especially family will take time off from work. And we can actually invest in them while they are outside of the workplace. And finally, we are paying a lot of attention to our SMEs, because we can only achieve that collective resilience if our SMEs are part of this game, this continuous investment in skills.

It is a fragmented SME market if we leave it uncoordinated. But we can coordinate it better. And through government working together with the industry now, we are moving towards a system of identifying amongst SMEs in each sector, the common skill requirements, aggregating those skill demands, and linking them to training providers. Advising the SMEs on how to redesign the jobs but also advising the training institutions, on how to redesign courses to suit the needs of SMEs.

This process of linking demand and supply of skills is very much part of our national system. We started this year with pilots in several sectors - the retail industry, the precision engineering industry, moving now to the wholesale trade industry, each quite fragmented industries. (We’ve) started with aggregating skills and linking enterprises to training providers and educational institutions. And we have started similar pilots for the green economy, for the caring economy and for the digital economy.

So these aggregators, what SSG calls Job Skills Integrators and Skills Development Partners, are a very important part of this national strategy to ensure that small firms are very much on this journey, not just large firms. And finally, I really want to give credit to our SkillsFuture Queen Bees – the large firms that are playing roles not just for themselves, but also helping other enterprises in their own industries. They are role models, but they're also part of the ecosystem where large firms help medium and smaller sized firms to upgrade their skills, so that we all become more resilient together.

Eventually, each of us benefits more if everyone is doing the same. If each of us invest in our workers, we are all better off because what goes around comes around. If we each invest in students while they are in tertiary education, or in mid-career workers, they come in better trained, because what goes around comes around. 

So that's what we're trying to achieve. I think we are making very good progress. I thank all of you. All of you who are involved in this tripartite effort for the progress we're making.

Let's make sure Singapore is very good at this. Thank you very much.