Singapore aims to retrain at least half a million mid-career workers a year

Singapore is fine-tuning its training framework for mid-career learners to achieve better workforce outcomes, with a goal of retraining at least half a million working adults a year.

Announcing this, Education Minister Chan Chun Sing highlighted the key challenges Singapore must overcome to upskill its workforce at scale. 

The country must overcome an asymmetry of information to spark the interest of working adults in reskilling and upskilling, he said. Part of what hold workers back are the various responsibilities they shoulder, such as work, financial, family and social commitments, Chan noted, at the launch of the SkillsFuture Forum 2022.

To that end, efforts like personalised skills advisory services have been set up, with plans to improve outreach to help workers navigate the training programmes, he said.

However, such efforts need to be complemented by other moves, like articulating companies’ demand for future skills, aggregating such demand in different sectors and activating a supply of such skills through quality training, said the minister. 

He noted that businesses may not know what future skills workers may need, and “this is where the Government, SSG, trade associations and chambers and our unions must come in and take the lead”, reports The Straits Times.

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Chan added that human resource teams must translate the demand for specific skills into their hiring and job design processes. “This will allow companies to focus more on skills and competencies, rather than relying on only qualifications such as degrees or diplomas as a proxy of the candidate’s suitability.”