Navigating the Uncharted Future of Work
by Kenny Tan
Last updated 20 July 2026
Over a decade ago, both my parents retired from the same company they started their careers in. While I have spent my entire career in the Public Service, I have worked in different organisations and in diverse roles. My daughters, who are still in school, have varied career aspirations that often change from year to year. It seems unlikely they will stay in any domain, organisation or job for long.
Whether one is pursuing success, growth, balance, meaning, or all of these things, the linear career model is no longer relevant. Instead, we now have what has been called a multi-stage career model, in which careers evolve with seasons of life. Even those comfortable with where they are may find themselves involuntarily thrust into uncertain career trajectories as rapid technological advancements and global economic upheavals disrupt job stability.
Pursuing a multi-stage career is like traversing uncharted lands. You hear of wondrous sights and exciting locales, or perhaps safer havens beyond the mountains, but how do you get to these places? Some of the paths are more difficult, requiring a good amount of fitness and consistency, hiking poles for rockier treks or crampons for navigating icy ground. Without the right tools, some places are simply inaccessible.
Over the past decade, the SkillsFuture movement has been equipping Singaporeans with such tools — skillsets, knowledge and guidance — so that they can overcome the barriers to better jobs and new careers.
SkillsFuture goes beyond helping Singaporeans to achieve their career aspirations. It also serves a vital national imperative. Rapid technological and economic changes present significant challenges for our small, open and ageing country. For our economy to stay competitive, relevant and capable of seizing new growth opportunities, we need an adaptable and resilient workforce. We need workers who are not only highly skilled, but also capable of reskilling swiftly and stepping deftly into new roles. Our future economy is like these uncharted lands — it holds promises of a brighter future for Singapore and diverse opportunities for Singaporeans, provided we can navigate it.
Are We on the Right Track?
In well-charted lands, it is much more straightforward to get from point A to point B. The path is identifiable, and obstacles along the way are known and can be prepared for. But we are not in familiar territory. Even hardworking Singaporeans may not get very far if they are lost or caught unprepared.
Our labour market data1 reveals concerning trends that suggest many are struggling in this new environment. Less productive sectors have increased their share of labour over the last decade. About 20% of resident job switchers experienced a pay cut. Within several sectors, we also observe negative firm allocation effects: less productive firms gaining employment share over more productive firms. In the job market, one in seven professional, managerial, executive or technician (PMET) jobs remain unfilled for at least six months. The most oft-cited reason by employers for this is the lack of appropriate skills. These are all signs of people getting lost in unfamiliar terrain and unequipped, or wrongly equipped, to overcome the obstacles. This is a sign of unfulfilled human potential.
Despite Singapore's formidable education and adult training system, why is this still happening? Individuals may hesitate to try something different due to a fear of the unknown — whether they can adapt, succeed, and keep paying the bills. This results in a status quo bias. Employers, too, hesitate to hire unproven candidates, fearing costly mistakes. Such hesitations create significant friction in the labour market, leaving many stagnant in jobs that may not fully unleash their potential, while businesses struggle to build a future-ready workforce.
Introducing Career Health SG
To address this, Ministry of Manpower (MOM), together with Workforce Singapore (WSG) and SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG), has launched Career Health SG, a SkillsFuture initiative. Career Health SG seeks to empower Singaporeans to take charge of and "ACE" their careers in three steps: Assess your career health; Chart your career path; and Execute your career plan. Like a compass in uncharted lands, Career Health SG aims to provide direction and clarity so that Singaporeans can better navigate their career journeys with confidence.2
Fostering a Career Health Mindset
Getting from point A to B, especially in uncharted territory, is not a single step but a journey that demands long-term planning and ongoing commitment. It is easy to put career health on the backburner when things are going well. But then if a career setback does occur, there will be more urgent things to deal with and fewer options at hand.
Education is necessary but insufficient. It is often inertia, more than information (or the lack thereof), that holds people back from making longer-term career plans. Just as a guide can help us navigate unfamiliar terrain, a career coach can help us work through our destination or career goals, develop a route for us to work our way there, and hold us accountable. WSG has introduced Polaris, a suite of career guidance programmes with personalised support by a certified career coach to help participants develop robust career development plans. The initial results are encouraging. More than 1,600 individuals have enrolled in Polaris programmes since it was first piloted in November 2023.
Scaling career guidance will not be easy. We need novel ways to make career guidance more enticing and accessible to individuals. We could try gamification approaches, such as those used in the National Steps Challenge to great effect. We must make career guidance more salient by catching individuals at the right time and right place: perhaps when they graduate from school and first enter the workforce, or when they have their first kid and are thinking about work-life balance. Career guidance could also be delivered through employers, so that its relevance to career progression is more obvious.
Developing Better Labour Market Intelligence
Once an individual has a career health mindset, it is time for action. But we can stumble over the very first step — knowing what skills are needed. Many businesses are unsure how their operations will evolve, much less the skills they will need when change comes. Some are unable to identify or articulate the skills they are seeking. Consequently, individuals lack clarity on what skills to develop and confidence that their efforts will be rewarded.
To address these significant information gaps and asymmetries, MOM and SSG launched the Careers & Skills Passport (CSP) in November 2024.3 It is a repository of Government-verified data on every Singaporeans' education, training and employment history: in effect, a portable digital curriculum vitae. Singaporeans can send their CSP data to job portals like JobStreet and FastJobs and use the data in their applications.
On the face of it, CSP seems like a simple data verification service, akin to using SingPass to apply for credit cards. But it is more than that:
CSP reduces information gaps using government-verified data. This data is valuable: jobseekers who use CSP data in their applications are 40% more likely to be shortlisted than those who do not.
CSP gives the labour market a common language, or taxonomy, for skills. Over time, it will become easier for businesses to signal the skills they require, workers to signal the skills they possess, training providers to signal the skills they can develop, and for all parties to understand one another when discussing skills and negotiating related issues.
CSP as a repository can incorporate yet more sources of data. We are working with schools to ingest micro-credentials, with professional bodies to ingest certifications, with job portals to examine how the skills content of jobs is evolving, and so forth. With these, we can begin to piece together a collaborative map of the labour market, using the information that each has to form a more complete picture.
We are quite far from this ambitious vision, but we have made a start. Since the CSP's launch, over 25,000 individuals have accessed and shared their data.
Enabling Job Mobility
Education and structured training have long been the primary channels for human capital development. However, with the half-life of skills shortening rapidly, work itself has become a significant means for learning and growth — not just via "on-the-job training" but "on-the-job doing". A 2022 McKinsey study4 found that over a 30-year career, work experience accounts for almost half of human capital value, with the greatest gains coming from bold moves, i.e. job switches, where the individual lacks 30-40% of the skills required in the new role.
Work experience accounts for almost half of human capital value, with the greatest gains coming from bold moves, where the individual lacks 30-40% of the skills required in the new role.
This presents an opportunity to solve one of the big challenges with training: its high opportunity cost for individuals and employers, when the returns on investment are unclear.
However, most employers would not take the risk of hiring a person who lacks 30-40% of the required skills, nor do they know how to support such hires. A key piece of the solution lies in skills-first hiring: recruiting those with transferrable skills and experience instead of relying overly on qualifications or same-job experience. Verified CSP data provides actionable insights by identifying the profiles of individuals who have successfully filled similar roles across the economy. This approach allows us to highlight less obvious, under-utilised talent pools, such as candidates from adjacent sectors or occupations. Such insights can also be translated into bespoke job and training recommendations for individuals, as well as candidate suggestions for hirers on WSG's MyCareersFuture portal.
Skills and experiences are often more transferrable than one might think. For instance, during COVID-19, many air stewards and stewardesses transitioned into healthcare roles when flights were grounded, and a good number have stayed on in patient-facing roles since. Skills such as the ability to listen, empathise, and provide appropriate care or service are valuable across both industries.
Skills and experiences are often more transferrable than one might think.
A less risky approach for employers is to look internally for adjacent talent pools. Internal talent already possesses valuable organisation-specific know-how, such as client and product knowledge. By systematically moving talent around to develop well-rounded employees (possessing "π-shaped" competencies), organisations can empower their employees to take on new roles more easily and move in tandem with business transformation.5
What gets measured gets done. MOM recently launched the Singapore Opportunity Index (SOI) in partnership with the Singapore University of Social Sciences and the Burning Glass Institute (BGI), a US-based think tank.6 The SOI, inspired by the American and British Opportunity Indices developed by BGI, uses objective data to measure the economic opportunities that an organisation creates for its employees along the dimensions of pay competitiveness, career progression (within or beyond the organisation), gender parity, employee retention and hiring opportunities. Like the CSP, the SOI injects more information and data-driven insights into the labour market, enabling businesses to compare against their peers and learn from the best-in-class to improve their human capital management practices and competitiveness. Individuals can also better identify organisations that offer opportunities which align with their career aspirations.
Strengthening the Career and Employment Services Sector
Individuals need support to improve their career health. Businesses need support to develop their workforce to propel their business forward. In uncharted territory, no one can navigate alone. The challenge is how we can provide this support to our 2.5 million local workers and over 300,000 businesses. We need volume. We need variety to cater to different needs and circumstances. We need velocity to match the rapid pace of change. The government is not big, innovative or fast enough to do all this on our own. Just as SSG has built up a credible ecosystem of training providers, each with its own expertise and catchment, we now need to build up the wider career & employment services sector. This diverse but fragmented sector consists of recruitment agencies, search firms, job portals, career guidance providers, HR consultants, HR technology providers, and more.
Our approach to this is to collaborate with key players in the field. Career Health SG already partners with job portals such as JobStreet and FastJobs. WSG's Polaris programmes are also delivered through its private sector partners, Ingeus and AKG. SSG is working with HR technology providers such as JobKred on TalentTrack+ to provide employers with in-depth workforce skills analytics.
Beyond public-private partnerships, more can be done to spur the growth of the sector, drive innovation and synergies across different service providers, and improve affordability and accessibility of good quality services and programmes for under-served segments. To this end, MOM and the Singapore National Employers Federation (SNEF) have convened the Alliance for Action on Advancing Career & Employment Services, comprising leaders from various fields in the sector. The AfA will collectively shape a vision and strategy to transform the career & employment services sector, to better meet the needs of an increasingly complex labour market.
What Does This Mean for the Public Service?
As public officers, we also need to start taking charge of our career health. The Public Service Division has launched the Career Fitness movement — essentially Career Health SG for the public service. Each of us must actively seek out new opportunities to grow: we can sign up for a new training programme, schedule an appointment with a career coach, and even explore secondments or short-term attachments to other parts of the service. (Click on this link to find out more about the Career Fitness movement.)
Fellow supervisors in the Public Service have a responsibility to bring out the best in our officers. We can foster a culture of continuous learning by providing coaching and mentorship. Offer stretch opportunities to those in our teams — or to those keen to join us from elsewhere. We must encourage and support our officers in pursuing new opportunities beyond our team. By doing so, we contribute directly to the strength, adaptability, and future readiness of the Public Service.
I hope that our Career Health SG journey has offered you some inspiration and food for thought. Think big, start small, and collaborate with partners to drive meaningful and impactful change.
Looking Ahead
As the SkillsFuture movement enters its second decade, our vision is for career health to become as deeply ingrained in our businesses and people as the culture of lifelong learning. At the end of the day, a job is more than just a means of earning a living. It is a way for us all to participate meaningfully in society, share in the prosperity of the nation, and find personal fulfilment.
A job is more than just a means of earning a living. It is a way for us all to participate meaningfully in society and find personal fulfillment.
Imagine a future where every individual possesses a career health mindset, supported by richer labour market intelligence, and a robust career and employment services ecosystem. We can craft our own paths to fulfilment and success. We can shape a future economy that translates growth into good career opportunities for Singaporeans from all walks of life, with diverse aspirations and in different life stages. We can find a bright future in these uncharted lands.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kenny Tan is Deputy Secretary (Workforce) at the Ministry of Manpower (MOM). His mission is to empower all Singaporeans to access good job opportunities and have a secure retirement. Prior to MOM, he has held various positions in the Ministry of Home Affairs, Ministry of Finance and Singapore Police Force. He currently serves on the boards of the Central Provident Fund Board, Singapore Land Authority and the Institute of Human Resource Professionals.
NOTES
Ministry of Trade and Industry, Singapore, "Economic Survey of Singapore Third Quarter 2020," November 2020, https://www.mti.gov.sg/Resources/Economic-Survey-of-Singapore/2020/Economic-Survey-of-Singapore-Third-Quarter-2020. More detailed labour statistics can be found at https://stats.mom.gov.sg/.
Career Health SG. https://www.careerhealth.sg
MySkillsFuture. "Careers & Skills Passport." https://www.myskillsfuture.gov.sg/csp
McKinsey Global Institute, "Human Capital at Work: The Value of Experience," McKinsey & Company, June 2, 2022, https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/human-capital-at-work-the-value-of-experience.
David Michels, "Going Pi-Shaped: How To Prepare For The Work Of The Future," Forbes, 27 September 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidmichels/2019/09/27/going-pi-shaped-how-to-prepare-for-the-work-of-the-future/.
Singapore Opportunity Index. https://www.singaporeopportunityindex.sg