Survey Finding of Workers Being Overqualified for Their Roles and Implications on Career and Wage Progression, and Underemployment

Ms Jessica Tan Soon Neo asked the Minister for Manpower (a) how does the Ministry assess the impact of rising overqualification on (i) long-term career pathways and (ii) wage progression; and (b) what steps are being taken to enhance (i) job redesign, (ii) skills-based progression, and (iii) workforce readiness for future shifts in jobs and job scopes.

I would also like to invite Mr Yip, Ms Lee and Mr Hoe to seek clarifications today, and consider withdrawing their questions filed for future Sittings if their questions have been addressed.

Mr Speaker, Sir, 19.4% of the resident workforce was overqualified in 2025. This was below the high-income countries' average of 21.6%. The vast majority of cases were voluntary. Of these overqualified, about nine in 10, or about 17.7% of the resident workforce, were voluntarily overqualified. I want to state, voluntarily overqualified. The remaining one in 10 of overqualified individuals were involuntarily overqualified.

As Ms Jessica Tan and Mr David Hoe noted, the voluntarily overqualified could include women and caregivers who may choose roles to explore a new career direction or to better fit around their family circumstances, even if they are overqualified for those roles.

In contrast, the involuntary overqualification rate was low at 1.7% of the resident workforce and has remained stable over the past decade.

To Dr Wan Rizal's question, involuntarily overqualified workers tend to be younger and tertiary-educated. This is consistent with typical early career pathways where workers may initially take on roles that do not fully utilise their qualifications before transitioning into better-matched roles as they gain experience.

The sector with the highest number of involuntarily overqualified workers was Transportation and Storage. Members are encouraged to refer to the Ministry of Manpower's (MOM's) Occasional Paper for more details.

Dr Wan Rizal and Ms Tan also asked about the impact of overqualification on longer-term career pathways. MOM currently does not track longitudinal outcomes of overqualified individuals. However, broader labour market outcomes remain favourable. If you look at the median income of full-time employed tertiary graduates over the past decade, the median incomes have risen from $5,800 to $7,600 over the 10 years, and this reflects continued wage progression.

We remain committed to help all individuals find jobs that can meet their personal needs as well as their career aspirations. This includes helping lower-wage workers, which Ms Tan asked about, find the jobs that can better utilise their skills, as they may be in entry-level jobs that do not do so.

Mr Yip Hon Weng, Ms Cassandra Lee and Ms Tan asked about our broader strategies to reduce skills mismatches. At the pre-employment phase, the institutes of higher learning (IHLs) work closely with industry partners to equip students with industry-relevant technical competencies and skills. And beyond initial qualifications, all of our workers are encouraged to, and they must, embrace lifelong learning.

The merger of Workforce Singapore (WSG) and SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG) into the Skills and Workforce Development Agency (SWDA) – later on today, I will be passing a Bill on that – will help our workers to do so by creating a single touchpoint for training, for career guidance and job opportunities. I do hope that Members of the House will support the Bill unanimously.

By bringing together the capabilities of both agencies, SWDA and its tripartite partners will be able to provide personalised career and skills insights and guidance to help jobseekers find options that better match their skills and their preferences.

Efforts by SWDA and the National Trades Union Congress' (NTUC's) Employment and Employability Institute will also build on existing upskilling and reskilling programmes that support our workers. These include Career Conversion Programmes (CCPs), the Mid-Career Pathways Programme and the SkillsFuture Career Transition Programme. Female caregivers returning to work from a career break can also access career guidance and skills training through WSG's herCareer initiative.

To address diverse needs and working arrangement preferences, MOM and tripartite partners promote a range of work and career options. This includes supporting enterprise job redesign for flexible work arrangements (FWAs) through the SkillsFuture Workforce Development Grant (Job Redesign+). Based on MOM's surveys, around 70% of firms offered FWAs in 2025, and this is up from 50% about six years earlier, in 2019.

I thank the Minister for the reassurance and for his reply. I would like to follow up on the long-term implications, particularly around how we are measuring the effects of overqualification on career and wage trajectories. I hear the Minister that we do not collect this data today, so I would like to ask how that goes. And I also like to build on the point about future workforce readiness, especially in terms of how we track skills utilisation and progression over time.

So, if I could ask the Minister, what indicators do the Ministry use to determine if overqualification is becoming persistent rather than transitional and what thresholds would trigger further intervention?

My second supplementary question is, does the Minister assess whether over qualification today may reduce readiness from emerging roles tomorrow and how is this risk being mitigated? Because overqualifications can depress wage trajectories, weaken skills utilisation and reduce long-term workforce competitiveness.

So, if the Minister can share how the Ministry tracks long-term wage career progression outcomes for workers, especially for younger graduates who remain overqualified for extended periods, and how these insights are being used to strengthen job redesign and skills-based progression efforts across sectors.

I thank Ms Tan for her very insightful four or five questions. Sorry if I miscounted them.

We have just started publishing this data because this particular indicator itself on overqualification, based on what we are doing, with regard to the data, it is actually quite new. We were able to derive these statistics using occupation and education data, which is captured from our annual labour workforce surveys, enabling us to determine whether a worker possesses educational qualifications that are higher than the typical requirements of a job. Because up till now, based on even international published statistics, underemployment data typically use a time-related measure, and today, the time-related measure still remains the only internationally accepted statistical definition of underemployment and as a proxy, overqualification.

So, we are starting, we will continue to monitor the trends over a longer time horizon. How do we measure success? We will, first and foremost, of course, focus on more of the macroeconomic data pertaining to our gross domestic product (GDP) growth and also, our median wages.

Today, hopefully with your support, with the formation of the new SWDA and the passage of the Bill later on this afternoon, we will focus on initially very targeted groups – the fresh graduates, the mid-career workers, to the elderly workers, and on top of that, also for caregivers returning to work.

With the different interventions across the different cohorts, segments and sectors, we would be able to, in time, track this data better and provide regular updates to this House. At the moment, even this publication of this Occasional Paper, we actually work with the International Labour Organization and we also work with the Labour Movement to triangulate the data sets.

We believe that, with the passage of time, we are also using – it is not a buzzword, but we are indeed using artificial intelligence at the different level of data analytics and triangulation, to allow us to work closely with our businesses and with the employers across different sectors, starting with those areas that we are more familiar with, to be able to better tweak and refine our policies to help our locals.

I hope that gives you enough reassurance. We are starting here and we welcome ideas from Members of the House to help us to refine, improve and also to have better reach, more precise policies to reach out and uplift all of our fellow Singaporeans.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and I thank the Minister for his response. I have two specific supplementary questions. Firstly, I would like to clarify whether MOM is looking at strengthening support for caregivers, specifically dealing with possible bias that employers might have for those who take a career break.

I also just want to highlight this to the Minister, that stepping out for caregiving should not mean stepping down permanently. I hope the Minister can give assurance to caregivers that they will be able to assume back to their previous role, because many of these caregivers are parents with young children.

Secondly, let me address the concerns of our youths. How would MOM also assure youths that might not have many internships or less connected backgrounds, that they will not be significantly disadvantaged in a labour market that increasingly rewards early internship networks and overseas exposure, as reflected in The Straits Times article this morning?

I thank Mr Hoe for his first point, which is an exhortation. Indeed, I think it is precisely why we are all coming together and to see how we can reach out to more caregivers, particularly should they choose the option of coming back to work. I think the Member would appreciate that the needs of caregivers are varied and they are also very, very complex. I do not think there is a one-size-fit-all policy that would go in, flood the system and uplift everyone. I do not think that any policy can do that.

If you just disburse in the form of a broad-based support, we may also end up not being able to get the desired outcome for those that need it the most.

So, our approach has always been to work with different sectors, depending on the type of industry that the particular caregiver wants to come back into. And I agree with the Member: stepping out does not mean stepping back or stepping down. There will be plans to work according to the sectors, for them to have a refresh and upgrade of the skills, to retool, to reskill, so that they are ready should they choose to come back into the workforce.

For youth internship, I indeed take note of the article today written by Ms Lin Suling in The Straits Times, it was a very long opinion editoral. But let me address one part which I think is important. Today, the statistics that were cited in the article pertain to fresh graduate employment outcomes, which indeed have softened from recent peaks. The peak was coming out from COVID-19, and everybody was rushing to fulfil backlog of orders, there was a big rush for graduates, for talent, coming on board.

But we should not be just looking at an isolated year-by-year number. The employment rates, if you look amongst young degree holders, and let us look at that age cohort, from 25 to 29 years old, they have actually remained broadly stable – and this has been at around 90% or nine in 10 over the past decade.

What this tells us and the article is actually quite precise in talking about fresh graduates. But I think it also demonstrates that some graduates may take longer to secure full-time roles initially. Most are able to find employment over time. So therefore, this points to a longer school-to-work transition, rather than a broad decline in graduate employment.

And I take the Member's point with utmost importance, about the ability for our undergraduates to secure internships. What we are now actively doing is working – of course, this is before the SWDA is formed – we are actively working with our IHLs to bring attachments and exposure, with experienced volunteer career advisors, to build the networks for many of these young undergraduates while they are in-flight through our IHLs.

We hope to strengthen that programme even more. We hope to work even more closely with the Ministry of Education with regard to career advisory services exposure. We have got quite a good measure of success with the GRaduate Industry Traineeships (GRIT) programme and I said that we have extended it this year.

We will continue to get these insights to see how we can work, particularly in sectors that are growth sectors that have a long runway, a long career trajectory, for our undergraduates. We are going to emphasise the foremost importance of this in the next few months. I hope that gives you the reassurance.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I thank the Minister for his response. I just have a very short supplementary question, which is, what additional support, besides CCP and the SkillsFuture Career Transition Programme, is available for mid-career workers who may be persistently over-qualified in their roles, especially those who have undergone reskilling, but still remain mismatched. Some suggestions would include things like hand-holding, coaching and even case management for this group of workers. I do see a lot of them at my Meet-the-People Session.

I thank the Member for his question. Indeed, our jobs are evolving very quickly and companies are also having to keep up with that very rapid transformation of what is happening in the world economy. There is not a particular, single policy that we can introduce that would be a panacea to cover every single potential mid-career displacement.

But what we are now doing that is an even higher step-up from what we have been doing all this while, is that, beyond just working with that potentially displaced worker or that displaced worker, we are also working with the businesses as well. This year at Budget Committee of Supply, if you recall, I introduced a step-up to the Enterprise Workforce Transformation Package with a SkillsFuture Workforce Development Grant (Job Redesign+). Through that, we not only fund workers in reskilling, upskilling, career guidance, enhancing Career Health SG, CareersFinder – many of these, I will talk about later on this afternoon – we are also funding companies to continue to press on with Job Redesign to improve their productivity through the Productivity Solutions Grant; through many of the enterprise development grants, which are disbursed by the economic agencies under the Ministry of Trade and Industry, which I am also closely working for.

So, there are multiple measures. On top of that, across different sectors, across different industries, when we get feedback, we will not hesitate to put up training programmes for those who want to seek a pivot or switch. The Infocomm Media Development Authority has the TechSkills Accelerator programme. The Monetary Authority of Singapore has a finance programme. In the biopharma sector, we have a biopharma talent track programme that allows many of them to switch, and also, programmes in healthcare.

So, the possibilities are there. They are wide. They are varied, as long as we are able to encourage, to socialise the idea with our workforce that they are not discouraged, there will be something for everyone.

I can go on for the whole list of the different programmes that we have available, but I think it would probably be beyond the scope of this particular Parliamentary Question session. But suffice to say that there are a lot of programmes out there. Even for myself, holding many of the different portfolios and also with the different programmes that we have, when I want to search for something during my Meet-the-People Session, I also rely on ChatGPT to navigate my own Ministry's myriad of programmes that we have.

So, I think you can envisage – it is actually a very comprehensive and a wide series of help that we have.