How do companies navigate the cost, in terms of time and dollars, of having to continuously upskill their employees?

Khiatani: First of all, you cannot see it as a cost. See it as an investment. Clearly, we are not a training institute, but we need to be a training centre in order to achieve our own objectives. That’s just the reality of life today.

My philosophy has always been that you hire for attitude and you train for aptitude. Of course, there are certain jobs where you need an engineer or an accountant, but even within that, over the 20- or 30-year course of the company, this person's job may change, provided he or she shows the potential.

Q: For SMEs, resources are always starved. How do you carve out time for your people?

Tan Ru-Ding: I view my job as building teams, building people. But even for me, it's sometimes difficult when you're trying to build people up, trying to get them to improve, expand their horizons and mindsets, but yet they're resistant.

But we’ve got to break through. We kept at programmes month after month, year after year, and it took probably 5 years for people to start changing their perspective.

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The most important thing is the leadership at the top. This political will is really the key component. It's easy to say that people are our best assets. But really, how much resources are you putting into your most valuable asset?

A lot of people put (training) in the back seat. But it's very important that the leaders at the top really look into how much time and effort they are putting into training your people.

Is this even an agenda on your monthly meetings? Very often it's not. It's left aside to the HR person, who's not even involved in the strategy or the discussion.

Q: If the usable lifespan of a skill has been shortened, how can businesses avoid looking at training as having reduced ROI (return on investment)?

Tan Kok Yam: You have no choice, because if you don't invest in the first place, then you're not even in the game to talk about ROI.

There is also another dimension to this. To keep a person in your company, you have to show him not just the pay – which is important – but that the X years he spends in the company will put him in a better place.

If he spends the X-plus-one year with the company, he would have learned (during these years) and (now) he’s doing more and helping the company more. Even if he chooses to leave, he’s in a better place. He’s learned more things by formal or informal training to be able to grasp those opportunities.

By doing so, you are able to attract good, driven and curious people, and that has to be part of your employee value proposition.

Khiatani: Actually, you should look at it as an opportunity. You may hire somebody as an engineer, but if that engineer one day becomes your head of department or even a CEO, can you imagine how much value he has created for you? Machines depreciate. So do skills, but people don't.

Tan Ru-Ding: As an SME, I have heard all these comments in my years. My counter is always this statement: What happens if you don't train them and they stay? Isn't that worse?

Q: How do we encourage prospective employers to employ older workers and how can we evaluate their ability to continue learning? How can job seekers themselves prepare to be evaluated?

Ang: I would really encourage people to not just think about their skills, because sometimes the skills become a bit defunct because the industry moves and changes. Think (instead) about the examples you can show and articulate it well.

Most people don't spend the time to do this. They kind of just go through their lives and careers and think that their CV is going to tell everything, or the different companies (they have worked for will) tell everything. You need to unpack everything that you've been doing, and actually say: “Here are some examples where I've demonstrated a few of these dimensions”.

At the core of it, when we talk about potential, (we look out for several dimensions). There’s curiosity, there’s insight. The other thing we look for is something you see in a playground all the time, especially for 2-and-a-half-year olds who don’t get what they want – determination.

Khiatani: Why CVs are sometimes just filtered away is because (employers) look at the pay (and choose to) not hire (the candidate) because they think they don't have the budget. And if they hire him at a lower salary, (they assume) he'll be disillusioned.

I don't think we should be making such judgments until and unless we talk to those people. We need to improve in that direction, because it is going to get more critical for us as we need to work longer. I think all of us in this room and listening in have to be part of the solution.

Q: What's the role of paper qualifications, besides getting through the door?

Tan Ru-Ding: My company no longer looks at paper qualifications. We look at what they have done in the past and what skills they have. I'm sure students that are going through the polytechnics… they are learning a lot, but I no longer see it as a prerequisite.

Khiatani: It just gives you a gauge of the person, that the person has had the discipline to do certain things, go through a certain process, and come out of it with a qualification. I do think that is still important, though I must qualify that some people develop later and can be just as effective… It still gives you a benchmark, at least, as to who the person is, but beyond that it is really a lot about experience and attitude.

Ang: The industry hasn’t moved that far ahead in terms of not considering qualifications. Certain qualifications are really important because you go through a really rigorous coursework that is curated, that gets you to explore areas you have never touched before, and some of it is very practical. But for the appointment at senior levels, we don’t look at it, because by the time the person walks in they are imbued with lots of wisdom in terms of the stories that they are able to articulate – about what they have done and how they have done it.

This is an excerpt of the panel discussion at the SkillsFuture Forum.