Skilling Up for the Future

How have learning and workforce development needs changed in the past decade?

In the ten years since SkillsFuture was launched, key shifts have taken place. First, the pace of change in the labour market has accelerated tremendously. Second, the public expectation of the SkillsFuture movement has gone up, and rightfully so as we reach a certain level of maturity. Whereas previously we were getting the public to embrace the idea of lifelong learning in general, individuals now expect training that has a real impact on their jobs and careers; that enhances their market value. To meet these emerging needs, SSG's organisational capabilities have also had to evolve.

Individuals now expect training that has a real impact on their jobs and careers.

In the past, we gained an understanding of the labour market by convening and collating expert opinion from different industries and agencies, taking anything from three months to two years to do so. If we continue with this approach, we will always be two to three years too late in understanding where the labour market is going. While expert perspectives remain important, we have had to find new ways to interrogate the labour market directly, using a combination of labour economics, data analytics, machine learning, AI and so on, to tease out more real-time insights about what the labour market is looking for in terms of skills.

As our understanding of the labour market improves and becomes more current, we then also need to be able to activate timely development of the demanded skills: our operations have to be more agile in making the right training available to our learners. Our cadence must match the cadence of the market. As the public comes to expect more from us, we will need to be more responsive to customers, offering them a level of service quality and efficiency that retains their confidence in the movement and its goals. We should also relieve our training providers and learning partners of any unnecessary administrative burden, delay or uncertainty in dealing with us for approvals and other processes. All this means SSG must step up our customer service and operational delivery.

A third priority is to understand that no matter how well we query the market, we cannot be experts in everything: to advance the SkillsFuture movement, we must rally as many allies as possible even as the labour market becomes more challenging. This means building up our organisational capability to build networks, persuade queen bees, big companies and other learning partners to come on board. When we recruit an ally, it is not to bask in their brand or success: we need to show that the relationship is a meaningful one. We need to find ways to engage not in a vendor-client way, but as partners in a broader ecosystem.

How has SSG sought to realise these new organisational capabilities?

In the past few years, we have reorganised ourselves to sharpen the new capabilities we need. We have structured our divisions into three groups, each responsible for one organisational capability.

First, there is a group responsible for operational excellence: which includes operations research, analysis and optimisation, as well as due diligence functions such as anomaly or fraud detection. Their goal is to make our processes as seamless and efficient as possible: for instance, by automating grant management so our training providers can receive their grants in time.

A second group pursues engagement excellence, including a unit taking care of customer experience. This group looks at how to engage companies and individuals, addressing the whole gamut of issues they may have about the SkillsFuture process: from prosaic questions such as how to claim credits to conceptual questions like how the green economy might be relevant to accountancy.

Finally, our quality management group strives for pedagogical excellence. They monitor the quality and standards of our training providers and courses, and looks at ways to improve the training and learning process.

Organising our staff this way gives them pathways to excel within each group's mission. They do not have to be locked into any one job, but can play a range of roles. So, an officer in the operations group could work on research, data analysis, anomaly detection, or process enhancement — they can broaden or deepen their contributions towards the agency's aims.

We have also invested in data and digital capability. When I first became CE at SSG, the agency faced a significant technical debt. In my previous appointments, townhall meetings were often about HR issues. At my first town hall in SSG, the main issue our staff brought up was that the IT systems were not up to the task. The technology was not giving our people confidence: in fact, they ended up creating more red tape and inconvenience. We had to overcome this first in order to be effective in our mission.

Part of how we addressed this issue was to make all our data and analytical platforms widely available to staff. We encouraged and empowered all our staff, through bootcamps, to engage with the data, whether or not their work directly required it. We did not just say, we need one data management person so we will just train one: we trained everyone and allowed discovery and experimentation to take place. The more people use these tools and this data, the more new ideas and new ways of doing things will emerge. Even if only some of these ideas work out, it would make a significant difference.

An important principle in digital and data transformation is that management not only does not have all the answers, we may not even have all the questions. Line departments are the ones who know best what we need to ask of the data in order to address actual frontline concerns: hence, we are making our data more accessible and available for them to query.

In the journey to learn, humility is vital. It may take years to train up a person or develop a capability in our organisation that another agency may already have. We have had to be open to exploring and bringing in fresh perspectives. For instance, SSG has been seconding staff from GovTech, as well as labour market economists from DOS, to help us level up certain skills quickly in the areas that we need. To build up our capacity, we also need a certain flow and circulation of people from the private sector, who are more familiar with the way particular industries work.

These broad changes are all about equipping SSG with the muscles to address new challenges and better serve the SkillsFuture movement.

What have you learnt about organisational learning and transformation from the quest to skill SSG up for the future?

First, most people do not learn for learning's sake: they want to contribute towards a purpose. So, it is important for an organisation to have an ambitious goal to provide a sense of mission. We need to identify problems that are meaningful and challenging and also clarify the organisational capacities we need to build to address these challenges. Then we link these to the human capabilities needed realise this: and we communicate this to everyone, so they can see how what they are learning and doing makes a difference to the bigger picture.

Most people do not learn for learning's sake: they want to contribute towards a purpose.

Next, it is important for an organisation's leadership to encourage and support an ethos of overtraining. If an individual is interested in any particular training, we should give them access to it. Even if the new knowledge or skill may not seem directly applicable to their current job role, there are other roles in SSG that will need it: it will not go to waste. It does not matter if those learning about frontline customer service management are back-office staff: it is good for everyone to understand the challenges and concerns of customer engagement. This is all part of understanding the organisation as a whole.

Third, psychological space and safety are absolutely vital for an organisation's people to come up with new ideas and challenge preconceived ideas or ways of doing things. You need to have the intellectual cut and thrust to debate and refine ideas without hurting feelings. Without realising this safe space, your organisation is not going to learn, adapt or grow.

Finally, we need to protect our people's time, so they are able to learn, explore and innovate rather than be swamped with their workloads. We need to let people know they do not have to feel guilty about being away from work for training. We must not eat too much into our staff's time for self-improvement and investment in their own capability-building just because we have a lot of fires to fight. This is easier said than done, but we must make the effort.

Part of achieving this is to have the organisational will to commit to certain skills-building activities, recognise them as mission-critical, non-negotiable, and hence give them protected time. Supervisors need to be convinced that the more competent our people are, the better. Investments in training will eventually pay off: even if training means delaying work a little today, the stronger the team will be tomorrow. The alternative is to be so immersed in solving today's problems that we fail to hedge against future disruptions and needs that we may not even be clear about yet.

In today's economy and workplace, we need to train well beyond what is obvious.

New skills may not seem immediately useful, but they are a form of insurance for the future: it would be too late to train only when a new challenge turns up, or when a new opportunity to exploit a new tech or technique arises. This is akin to relationships. Networks and trust need a long runway to build — we cannot call on partners only when we need help. We need to invest these efforts well ahead of need.

In today's economy and workplace, we need to train well beyond what is obvious.

Can you highlight examples of how learning initiatives at SSG have led to transformational outcomes?

When SSG's data team first started and was seeking questions to ask of our data, it was difficult to get our divisions to think of data-driven lines of enquiry. Today, they have been swamped with lines of enquiry — everyone now wants a piece of the data action. Our data team is now telling these internal customers they can query the data themselves. This is a happy problem because it means the new technology has proven its productive value and is in demand. This also comes from our people being empowered with the skills and knowledge to think about its uses and relevance to the problems they are trying to solve. They have this new resource, the ability to harness it, and want to make use of it. No one person could come up with all the different lines of enquiry the collective wisdom of the staff is generating, and it is making a difference to our mission.

Just like with footballers in a seasoned team, we give them a goal and the general game plan, and we trust their skill and intuition to carry it out.

Indeed, this is a microcosmic demonstration of the larger shift in today's economy: from the dated Taylorist work of the industrial age — where workers are assigned very specific, discrete tasks with specific KPIs — to an environment where we cannot in fact tell workers exactly what to do. Instead, just like with footballers in a seasoned team, we give them a goal and the general game plan, and we trust their skill and intuition to carry it out. This is how we must think about deploying human capital today.

Sometimes, the problem before us is a basic one, but it can hold the mission back. For instance, one of the basic challenges we had was attendance-taking for our courses: we needed to make sure the person who signed up attended the course, the training was delivered, and the grant money invested had not been abused. The old way of doing this required a good deal of manual work and record keeping, and follow-up audits. It locked up a lot of resources both for the providers and our own officers, which is a deeply unsatisfying situation.

To resolve this, we adopted existing technology used during the COVID pandemic for Safe Entry: a simple Singpass verified QR code system for learners to validate their attendance. This simple step to centralise and streamline attendance-taking changed the game. If someone registers their attendance in the system, we take it as their own responsibility to actually attend the course and to learn. It allowed our SSG officers and our providers to focus on higher order tasks. Instead of manually ticking boxes, they can now use the consolidated digital attendance data to scan for anomalies, and to even look at how course design can be improved.

This is just one example of how SSG and the SkillsFuture movement has to mature and transform, away from a numbers game towards being more inclusive and more reflective, in order to do more and meet greater expectations. Technology is being deployed not for its own sake but to permit us to do things differently and to do more different things. This is part of what SkillsFuture is about.

The SkillsFuture movement has to mature and transform, away from a numbers game towards being more inclusive and more reflective.

How do you envision SSG's role changing in future as the spirit of the SkillsFuture movement takes hold more broadly?

In theory, it is possible that lifelong learning is so embedded in our national culture that SSG will no longer be needed to nudge and facilitate these efforts, but that is unlikely for now. A more realistic trajectory is that our efforts, along with the SkillsFuture movement, becomes more decentralised. The trade associations and professional bodies could play more of an autonomous role: for instance, one Swiss organisation does not take government funds but funds training through membership fees, because members see the need for it. These associations could choose to move on their own, at a quicker pace than the national norm, driven by their sector's priorities. This would be a good development for Singapore.

I think SSG will have to be around to address cross-domain, cross-sectoral needs, but the movement will be strengthened by having more, different parties come forward to be part of the ecosystem.

Our efforts in the past were all about scaling up capacity, and dealing with the challenges of scaling. But we do not want to just be good at scaling up, nor do we want to be a grant-giving body, an ATM for training providers. We want quality, relevance and responsiveness. This is what Singapore needs. As an organisation, we must level up to help realise this next bound of SkillsFuture.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tan Kok Yam is the Chief Executive of SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG). He leads the organisation to drive and implement the national SkillsFuture movement. To this end, SSG strives to promote a culture of lifelong learning, build a support system to enable the pursuit of skills mastery, and raise the quality of adult education and training in Singapore.

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