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5 minute read

January 24, 2025

President Tharman: The Realities on Why Career Health Matters to Singaporean Workers and Employers

Speaking at the World Economic Forum 2025, President Tharman Shanmugaratnam shared key points that relate to Singaporean workers and why reskilling and upskilling must be at the forefront for us.

President Tharman speaking at Davos 2025

Many Singaporeans have been hearing the term career health with increasing frequency in recent times. In case you are still wondering what it is, the Ministry of Manpower defines it as: “ Charting long-term career pathways through career coaching and deepening one’s knowledge and skills with insights on growth jobs and industries.”

“With this, Singaporeans can take proactive steps to improve their career outcomes through training, on-the-job learning, and intentional career moves.

“They can also make the best use of the wide array of Government upskilling and career conversion programmes.”

But what about the why? Why is career health so important, and why is it important now?

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland recently at a panel focused on “Closing the Jobs Gap”, Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam shared key facts and thoughts that explains the importance of career health and planning, and why reskilling and upskilling matters to local employers, workers, and jobseekers alike.

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Here are some key points he made below:

“Not just a crisis of jobs, but a crisis of social compact”

President Tharman: We have to recognise that this challenge (on a jobs and skills gap between what employers need and what workers are skilled at) doesn’t just affect the ministries of manpower and employment, employers and unions; it’s actually a much broader societal-wide challenge.

As such, we have to think of addressing these challenges throughout our own personal lives and careers comprehensively.

The fact is, if you look across countries, what you do to develop human potential through life shapes how well people do in jobs – whether they retain jobs, whether they’re able to adjust to the churn in the job market, and whether they end up feeling like they’ve had a satisfactory career.

It doesn’t stop at school. You don’t just address this upstream, and think it is taken care of the downstream.

It requires continuous investment through life in human potential. One of the big challenges we face all over the world in the advanced countries and developing world (e.g: the United States, Europe, Britain, China) is there is now a huge mismatch of skills and a mismatch of aspirations.

People who’ve invested family or state resources and in a tertiary education come onto the market and find they can’t find jobs that match their skills and aspirations.

Realigning education to become more skills-focused, and for all ages

That mismatch of skills and aspirations is a major challenge, and, if we don’t solve it, we get a whole generation feeling the system has failed them.

It requires a few basic adjustments. I’ll just stick to two: firstly, what happens in tertiary education internationally almost without variation (with the exception of Singapore and a few northern European countries) tertiary education has been expanded.

But we also had it tilted very heavily to one particular model of education that previously applied to a very narrow cohort of students, when university education was rare, which is a highly academic education.

That’s also created a hierarchy where academic skills are ranked above technical skills, or the skills you acquire through experience. That’s at the heart of the mismatch of what people are trained for, and what the job market and employers want.

It can be corrected. We have to find ways where the technical and applied route for learning is also a route to achieve the highest levels of excellence and expertise, so that people come out with the benefit of skills that they know are relevant.

Often renowned academics and the heads of universities argue that traditional education is good as it gives you more breadth and the soft skills you take through life.

But, soft skills and breadth are not the sole province of the traditional university education. They can also be developed through the technical and applied route, through dual education.

This is because there are so many soft skills: the soft skills to develop and build the strengths in a team, and skills to deal with the unexpected.

That’s a lot of breadth of mind that develops in the workplace and through technical education where you’re constantly having to toggle between different concepts, different technologies, and just keep pace with the changing nature of the workplace.

I don’t want to knock too hard the traditional model, but it shouldn’t be defining the broad landscape of higher education.

Then we come to what happens when people are in the workforce, when they’re mid-career, when they no longer feel they’re that young.

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Churn is going to continue in the workforce. In fact, dislocation is going to continue apace and artificial intelligence is a much more powerful driver of disruption that previous technologies have been.

We can’t say for sure now whether the displacement of jobs that AI will bring will be larger in the way it compliments current human jobs. In the short-term you’ll get a lot of complementarities, but in the long-term no one knows as AI is becoming more and more powerful with regard to a much broader range of human tasks.

But what we can do is to try and make sure that we develop skills continually now so as to reduce the prospect of AI being substitutive at some point of the future, and increase the prospect of AI being complimentary to human skills.

In other words, don’t wait to see what happens in 15 to 20 years from now. Start acting now in skills development, which means when people are still at work, when in they’re in their prime. Invest now, and invest continually; that’s what a few countries are now doing very seriously.

Thinking beyond just security and good pay for both employees and employers alike

I was looking at the Edelman survey that just came out, and one dimension that I think is going to stick is this: When you survey ordinary people and workers about what they want in employers, it used to be largely that they want security and good pay.

But now equally important is that they want training and retraining just as important as good pay.

And there’s some wisdom in that. People have sussed out what is happening and what they need to have a secure job.

For those in their mid-life or mid-career, career and skills changes are available

For those mid-stream (mid-life or mid-career) in life, we have to find ways in which those who are inevitably dislocated by trade, or increasingly by automation and AI, can regenerate their skills and jobs. The market doesn’t take care of this very well; find ways in which displaced communities can be re-trained and re-geared to new employers and new areas of demand.

It’s been done quite well in a whole range of countries. For instance, if you look at coal workers – we have to phase out coal workers overtime – places like Germany, South Africa and South Korea have made a deliberate efforts to retrain coal workers for a range of other jobs.

(For example) in Korea they gave them the skills to work on transmission and distribution for the power sector, including renewable power. In South Africa they received a whole range of other technical skills that gave them good jobs.

For more, watch the full video below.

To watch the full video, click here

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