BIG PUSH TO OPEN UP MORE PATHWAYS TO JOBS

Since the last quarter of last year, before #Covid19 hit, I had described Singapore’s job market as experiencing “persistent showers with pockets of sunshine.”

With the Covid-19 outbreak, the weather has become much more uneven and unpredictable. We see thunderstorms in many sectors, while others are beginning to brighten up. No one can tell when the weather will clear up, and to what degree it will clear up. There may be successive waves. It will not only depend on how we emerge from Covid within Singapore, but also what’s happening elsewhere and the impact to trade and investment.

We can’t be sure how the situation will pan out, but it is best to work on the assumption that it will get tougher and to make sure that we are ready for it. What we can be certain of is Singaporeans’ livelihoods and families are at stake. We cannot have a wait-and-see attitude. We must act decisively.

In normal times, the Government has focused on helping jobseekers minimise “missed” matches, and mis-matches. These are now abnormal times, and we are facing new challenges. There is low visibility of when the economy will get better and employers are likely to be more cautious in hiring until the weather is clear. The media has carried some of these stories, of job offers being revoked, businesses delaying or scaling down hiring.

MOM’s labour market statistics also shown that vacancies have gone down. For now, the Job Support Scheme is providing some relief for employers to retain their local workers, but spikes in displacements can and will probably happen. It will no longer be just about a mismatch of job-skills, or wage expectations. 

We have to prepare for this new and much more challenging situation:

• A mismatch in timing, where jobseekers are eager to get into a job, but businesses are not ready to hire
• And also a mismatch in scale – many more jobseekers than jobs available

It is an enormous challenge, and we will have to activate every possible channels of opportunities, mobilise them as quickly as possible, and at the same time, help Singaporeans to tap on them.

How do we do this?

1.  Aggressively expand existing pathways
2. Open up new pathways

Existing pathways: We will have to work very hard to help more than 70,000 jobseekers. We are matching jobseekers to jobs through the #SGUnited Jobs initiative. It will be scaled up to provide more than 40,000 vacancies in 2020. We will be conducting more virtual career fairs and resume the Careers Connect on the Go, when we can, to bring career coaching services closer to Singaporeans. The public sector will support this by creating 15,000 jobs. These include short-term jobs to handle COVID-19 related operations. There will also be longer-term jobs created or for which hiring has been brought forward in the public sectors, such as healthcare and early childhood education.

We are also ramping up career conversion programmes to more than 14,000 places in growth sectors such as InfoComm technology. There are also job Redesign reskilling/redeployment programmes to help workers who are vulnerable or at risk of redundancy to undergo reskilling and take on new or redesigned job roles within the same company. Also we are working under SGUnited Skills to greatly scale up training places at IHLs and our CET centres – up to 30,000 training places, to position jobseekers for future jobs 

At the same time, we are also challenging ourselves to open up new pathways. There is a current gap and an opportunity, depending on how we look at it. Many businesses need to transform and want to do so, but they don’t have resources to spare. On the other hand, many jobseekers continue to want to gain meaningful work experience, which offers something quite different from a standalone skills programme. We should get creative here and find new pathways that benefit both. 

It is win-win if we can organise “traineeships” or professional/industrial attachments for the jobseekers at businesses, and do so on a massive scale to also include mid-career jobseekers. This is not without challenge. 

The work must be meaningful, or jobseekers will not be interested. They need to be paid a reasonable amount. The companies have to get some value such as building new capabilities. The Government will have to step in, involve partners such as the TACs, provide adequate funding support and help both sides get going

Of course, these roles are not the same as a job, but they are a pathway. For many, it will lead to eventual employment. It may not be in the same company or even industry, but the experience is worth something, a springboard. At the broader level, we continue to build up Singaporean’s own human capital.

It will be a big push to open up all pathways to a job. It’s not an easy journey and will take enormous effort, but we should not let crisis set us back.

We have the resources and determination, and can be nimble to weather this storm together with our people. Consider some of these programmes an umbrella, and others as searchlights into the future, difficult as the environment is. They will provide some cover and direction along the way. You may get a bit wet but at least, still moving forward. When the bad weather eventually clears, you got closer to your destination. And Singaporeans and Singapore arrived at a better, brighter place than when we started.  

- JoTeo