Transformation, upskilling and reskilling of the workforce

Like many other nations, Singapore faces a talent and skills crunch across sectors and industries. As a key workforce strategy, the new Jobs-Skills Integrators pilot reflects the Government’s commitment to prioritise reskilling and upskilling as it aims to help employers enhance training and place workers in suitable roles. To consciously retrain workers with a new role in mind, it is important to critically look at the skill gaps and identify the right training programmes to bridge these gaps. Business leaders need to encourage their executives to rethink and redesign tasks and responsibilities to better align roles with the changing environment.

While many local enterprises will welcome this type of support with workforce and skills planning, we anticipate that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), in particular, will greatly benefit from the expertise that these Jobs-Skills Integrators bring. Moreover, to facilitate and enhance the job matching process, the identification of skills gaps and the right training will not only alleviate enterprises’ talent crunch pressures, but will further enhance the effectiveness of matching demand and supply of key skills for the future.

On a related note, the Finance Minister announced a $4 billion top-up to the National Productivity Fund (NPF), which was established in 2010 to improve business productivity, continuing education and training of workers. In addition to this substantial investment, the NPF’s mandate will be expanded to attract quality investments by supporting businesses in building new capabilities, add greater value to the domestic economy and upskill the workers. Interestingly, this expansion of investment promotion as a supportable activity of the NPF comes at a time when Singapore expects lesser scope in the use of tax incentives to attract new investments as a result of the global move toward a minimum effective tax rate for corporates.

We look forward to more details of how the expanded NPF resources will be deployed to create opportunities for ecosystem players to collaborate with the Government in this journey.