Skills and Workforce Development Agency Bill

Thank you, Speaker, and I thank the Minister.

First of all, the Minister says that MyCareersFuture has 60,000 postings. It aspires to 100,000. There is a widespread perception that job postings on MyCareersFuture is a compliance exercise rather than reflects genuine hiring channels. So, how would the Minister ensure that more of these MyCareersFuture's postings are genuine vacancies?

Second question, the Minister has not addressed my point on sectoral bargaining. Let me put the question more directly. The economic skill formation literature is quite clear that firms tend to under-invest in deep skills training when they face poaching risks – they lose the worker, the day after they have spent a lot of time training, putting them through expensive training.

Wage compression through sectoral bargaining is the established solution. NTUC currently bargains at the enterprise level. So, is it the Government's position that NTUC should not bargain at the sectoral level or that sectoral bargaining is unnecessary? Thank you.

I do not have the exact statistics in terms of what the Member was talking about. And I would ask him to also point me perhaps to the statistics that say that all the advertisements in MyCareersFuture are just a paper exercise. If he can highlight any specific company or instance of companies posting on this particular portal as a paper exercise, we will not hesitate to investigate the company. But rather than make a blank statement, come up with the specifics.

With regard to poaching risks, I want to also share a different perspective. Companies that invest in the training of their workers, whether they work through the NTUC Company Training Committees or they work through our job redesign package, work through WSG's Career Conversion Programmes, have seen better retention for their employees. In fact, many of the companies that engage in this type of training tend to attract more talent into their companies against companies who do not.

I have been in private sector all my life. A certain amount of poaching exists, even amongst doctors, medical professionals. They move from groups to groups, but that does not mean that because of that, the entire industry is, therefore, at risk of being undermined or competed away. Perhaps, I can share more of these insights separately. Perhaps, inviting Mr Tiong to file a separate Parliamentary Question at another Sitting, given the fact that we have just finished five hours of this debate.

Sir, can the Minister elaborate a bit more about how SWDA will enhance the job search assistance programme? Specifically, will career counsellors move beyond basic resume editing and portal referrals to leverage real time vacancy data for proactive matching and advocate for candidates?

Today, SWDA will leverage on MOM's labour data. The different engines that we have, the different portals that we have within the umbrella of the Government, provide significant opportunities for AI-powered recommendations. First and foremost, on the jobs and skills that is needed and this will help users to better plan for the upskilling and career needs.

NTUC has its own AI career coach, which, just now, one of the labour Members of Parliament shared. On top of that, the Career and Skills Passports with the skills that have been recorded can be more precisely mapped to the different sectoral skills framework to allow for a more differentiated, a more precise matching. A lot of that enhancement of that data coming together will allow us to, therefore, be able to provide a shorter time to matching, and at the same time a more precise matching and more targeted towards skills-based hiring, compared to what it is currently, and we will continue to measure that and provide regular updates.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I thank the Minister for his clarification regarding measurement. I am actually really heartened to hear that that MOM is actively tracking the outcomes for individuals who undergo the career conversion programmes, but I also would like to point out that the number of individuals covered by the career conversion programmes are only a small subset of Singaporeans who do undergo many other kinds of career-related training under the SkillsFuture scheme.

So, I would like to ask if the Minister will also like to confirm then that the new agency will indeed also be extending the tracking of these outcomes and whether it is working for these other Singaporeans who are undergoing training, so that Singaporeans can have a clearer picture of what works, what works well, what is not working? And I hope the Minister can agree that, by collecting and publicising data like that, that it will only help to further reinforce the importance of lifelong learning and upskilling amongst Singaporeans once they see the numbers for themselves.

I have provided just now in my round-up speech about the impact of the career conversion programmes, which is organised by WSG, and I did not add NTUC Company Training Committees' success rates as well. I do not have it with me. The Secretary-General will be able to provide that. But suffice to say, to further add on to your other colleague, Mr Giam's earlier point, the SWDA's integrated intelligence function will provide forward-looking signals on what roles and what skillsets are in demand, so then this will allow students and even their families in the IHLs to make more informed decisions.

SWDA will also make the jobs and the skills intelligence accessible through its digital platform, through the multiple career advisory touchpoints. And guidance is available at the point of decision making, not only after they have entered a particular job itself. So, with that, I believe that that matching should be even more pervasive, and it will reach out to a wider segment of the population.

On top of that, we are not just focusing on the workforce. We are also focusing on the employers. I have also announced at Budget this year, we are enhancing the Enterprise Workforce Transformation Package and the grants will tie the companies to specific deliverables with regard to job redesign. The details will be further shared once SWDA comes into existence in July. I hope that gives the Member that reassurance.

I thank the Minister for responding to my question just now. I am glad to hear that there will be more precise matching with the help of SWDA's the integrated intelligence function. But can I ask if this function will be provided to all jobseekers who approach SWDA or its agencies, like e2i, to seek for job assistance? Because it would not be helpful if only a small proportion of jobseekers get to benefit from it, while the rest are just provided with the resume touch-ups or referrals to portals.

Core to the success of this entire exercise requires mindset change – and I did make that a very clear point when I first started my speech.

We have, over the past few years, rolled out many initiatives, including Career Health SG. The case we exhort, we encourage all of our Singapore residents to do is to really take an interest in their own career health, going into their own Career Health to update their own training and look at what are the adjacencies in terms of the skills training that will be required to keep up with the latest development in the industry and economic development.

When they continue to keep up, our portal will also be able to push courses to them, because we would have triangulated from trade associations and chambers, from the employers, from industry as to how the industry is moving, in what directions they are moving. Regardless of what we do, some sectors will face a sunset phase. This happens in all businesses. And for them, this would then allow them to decide whether they want to upgrade themselves in a different industry, allow them to pivot across. As long as they go on that Career Health, going on to CareersFinder, SWDA will work with them every step of the way.