Learning Through Crisis: Workforce Singapore's Crucible of Fire

The Initial Phase

In 2016, a year after the SkillsFuture movement started in 2015, the former Workforce Development Agency was split into two agencies: Workforce Singapore (WSG) and SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG). As the first CE of WSG, my first and fundamental task was to clarify the separate roles of the two new agencies.

The political guidance was to ensure there were no gaps in our policy coverage, even if there might be some overlaps in responsibility. In practice, this led to some early confusion on the ground. Both businesses and individuals were unsure whether to come to WSG or go to SSG for their continuing education and training (CET) and workforce development needs.

As our agencies evolved, our relative priorities became sharper. The work of SSG, being training oriented, had a longer time frame and closer engagement with training providers and institutes of higher learning. WSG had a greater emphasis on employment, on those whose employment were at risk, and on employers with an urgent shortage of workers. Our focus was more on immediate needs. If the SkillsFuture movement looked to serve all Singaporeans in the workforce, WSG prioritised individuals who were either voluntarily changing careers or had lost their jobs.

Once we were clear about our focus at WSG, we began to build the foundation to support our work. The first piece of this foundation was a digitalisation drive.

In partnership with GovTech, we developed and launched MyCareersFuture portal,¹ which has since become a one-stop website for job application needs. Today, the portal enables jobseekers to be more aware of the skills they possess and recommends them to relevant jobs based on their current skills, work experiences and competencies. Onboarded employers can shortlist applications with closer matches and receive talent recommendations of potential candidates who are open to career opportunities and possess the relevant skills for the job. Data from the portal has helped us build up a deeper understanding of the job market, including the types and nature of jobs being advertised, salaries, and hiring success rates.

A second foundational piece was building a tighter relationship with employers, mainly through business associations, both horizontally through organisations such as the Singapore Business Federation, and along verticals, as part of our professional conversion programme (now called the Career Conversion Programme), designed to help those who wanted to switch paths mid-career. We started to look at the bottlenecks in the existing programme, taking in feedback from employers and jobseekers, and scaled up the programme significantly — by orders of magnitude — to make it more user-friendly for employers to use.

Navigating the COVID-19 Pandemic

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, we knew that the world was in crisis. Internally, we had an understanding among our partnering agencies: including SSG and the Ministry of Manpower. We did not know how it would evolve, but we were certain we needed to do something. Our assumption was that employment would be challenged, with a deep fall in business confidence. Graduating cohorts would have trouble finding jobs. If the crisis stretched on, even employed workers would suffer. We also knew that just incentivising or persuading employers to keep jobs would not work in a severe crisis. To absorb the employment-challenged, SSG quickly ramped up training programmes.

We did not know how the crisis would evolve, but we were certain we needed to do something.

However, unlike previous crises, many companies in Singapore had already sent their workers for ongoing training. WSG's approach was to encourage employers to take on new employees and retrain them on the job to be ready for their new roles, with the government offering financial support for these career conversions. For companies who were unable to take on new staff on a permanent basis, WSG put forward the SGUnited Traineeships and the SGUnited Mid-Career Pathways Programme - Company Attachments.²

While this risked undercutting actual employment, which is always preferable to a temporary work attachment, it was still preferable and more productive than workers not being employed at all during a crisis.

Employment opportunities in some industries, such as logistics, are contingent on the company in question winning a contract. Under the attachment scheme, a worker thus stood a chance of being absorbed into full employment if the company they were attached to won the contract; otherwise, they could also join another company in the same industry that had vacancies. WSG was nevertheless careful to design the traineeship scheme so it would be less attractive than subsidised programmes for full-time employment. It was an instrument to tide workers and employers over the COVID-19 crisis.

Because of our prior relationship with several big employers, such as Singtel and DBS, we were able to get them to come on board at the start and take on trainees to signal success and build confidence in the programme. The programme was implemented within a few weeks.

Response to the scheme was positive. While SMEs were sceptical of the traineeship scheme at first, they quickly caught on that it was a good deal and demand surged. For WSG, the new challenge was processing applications for the scheme in time, addressing complaints from both employers and individuals seeking traineeship. By simplifying the criteria and paperwork, and making the most of MyCareersFuture as the digital platform to handle queries and applications, we were able to clear this bottleneck in a few weeks.

Towards the end of the pandemic lockdowns, another challenge emerged. SSG and WSG were tasked with advancing the SkillsFuture movement's training and careers push through a major ground publicity effort, even though there was still widespread concern about infection from COVID-19. To do this, we had to innovate new ways to conduct skills and careers fairs physically but in a relatively safe manner, all across Singapore.

We developed a more compact fair concept, which was easier to set up, and deployed digital interaction, using iPads so that members of public could interact with a career coach or career ambassador online, similar to bank video-tellers. This meant minimising the number of staff who needed to be physically on location — reducing both risk of exposure to infection and the manpower needed for our massive publicity drive. A small in-person team at each onsite location could be backed up by a remote team interacting virtually. We proliferated our messaging through standees at hawker centres, with staff wearing signage handing out leaflets at MRT stations and other sites with high footfall.

Out of pandemic-driven necessity, we embraced the digitalisation of engagement and communication: today, this has become mainstream, with broader acceptance of online consultations and even job interviews. The process of having to learn by doing amid the pandemic helped WSG level up its organisational capacity. The learning moved across the organisation rapidly. Different divisions in WSG stepped into different roles they would not usually have taken on in normal times: for instance, the communications team not only handled the website but also led in-person engagement and skills and career fairs.

Through these and other various efforts, the number of jobseekers placed per year has tripled from 21,000 in 2016 to more than 68,000 in 2021.

Key Lessons: Leadership and Communication Matter

The experience of leading WSG through its early years amid an unprecedented global pandemic holds many lessons.

First, WSG was dealing with entirely new tasks and challenges, using processes that were not entirely within our control — we often depended on external partners and stakeholders, such as trainee host companies. In such cases, we cannot be sure of the right incentives or levers to elicit the desired market response. Even with a well-designed scheme, broad awareness is vital for success: it can take time to generate public interest and take-up. At different phases, there will be different pain points and expectations. For WSG, we swung from worrying about slow public response, to an overwhelming number of applications for our traineeship scheme.

Knowing when to exit a policy or initiative is necessary. To be in sync with changes to the broader economy, our COVID-19-era traineeship provisions did not continue after the pandemic. As business confidence returned, we did not want government-subsidised trainee attachments to distort the job market. With better data coming in through our digital platforms, it became clearer that the most vulnerable group were mature workers above forty, for whom traineeships were less relevant. But standing down a popular scheme comes with its own difficulties, and demands effective engagement — in WSG's case, we had to explain to many employers why we were withdrawing traineeships, which they had come to rely on.

On occasions when public impatience boiled over, we had to focus on carrying out service recovery, sorting out fundamental issues, and looking forward. This is where, as a leader, it is important to know your staff and support them through challenging times, and to know what their limits are. One critical factor at WSG was that the team had been stable in the preceding years, and had built up trust and a good understanding of one another's strengths and constraints. As CE, I found it beneficial to have a strong team of deputies to lean on and to devolve responsibilities to make the cognitive load and stress more manageable rather than place them all on any one person. By the same measure, having good trust with other important partners and stakeholders means key policy issues can be sorted out quickly.

It is important to know your staff and support them through challenging times, and to know what their limits are.

It is important for leaders to find ways and means to reach out to staff. Before COVID-19, I had regular town hall meetings with staff. As we entered the pandemic lockdown, I wanted to speak to the staff to reassure everybody and to check in on everyone. There was no suitable technology for this at the time, so I used our government Facebook account as a makeshift tool to livestream to the whole WSG team. This was a very new experience at the time, but it was vital to demonstrate to our people that management wants to hear from them. It set the tone for us to work through the crisis, build trust, and grow our collective capacity for the long term.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tan Choon Shian is currently Chief Executive of the Singapore Totalisator Board (Tote Board). As the first Chief Executive of Workforce Singapore (WSG) from October 2016 to June 2023, he played a pivotal role in formulating long-term strategies, catalysing innovation to help jobseekers and enterprises, and instituting necessary organisational changes to overcome immediate and long-term workforce challenges. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Choon Shian led WSG to effectively implement several key elements of the Government's response to support jobseekers and manage unemployment. This included the launch of SGUnited Traineeships and SGUnited Mid-Career Pathways Programme - Company Attachments.

NOTES

1. MyCareersFuture. https://www.mycareersfuture.gov.sg

2. Currently known as Mid-Career Pathways Programme for Mature Mid-career Individuals.

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