Panellists:

• Tan Kok Yam, chief executive, SkillsFuture Singapore

• Lee Hui Li, managing director, Microsoft Singapore

• Lee Kian Chong, chief executive officer, Deli in the Park

• Aslam Sardar, chief executive officer, Institute for Human Resource Professionals

• Moderator: Christopher Lim, associate editor (product), The Business Times

Q: The theme of today’s forum is “Digital Upskilling for Business and Career Growth”. What do we mean by digitalisation in 2023?

Tan Kok Yam: This trend has been with us for quite a few years now, and I would summarise it by saying that it is a democratisation of technology and technological capabilities.

Some years ago, it would have been a lot more expensive for a small company to even host its own website, have its own database. But now with cloud technology and software as a service, suddenly that becomes accessible not just to companies, but even to individuals.

So there is (a process of) learning by companies, to say: “Oh, look, these are all available for me. How do I fit them into the context?”

Whether it’s front-end, servicing the customer, or as backend: organising your data, looking for insights, figuring out how to reach out to a wider customer base to engage your customers better, or even just to deal with logistics of supply and demand.

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All these possibilities suddenly become open, and not just to big MNCs (multinational corporations) but to SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) as well.

Q: Skill lifespans are getting shorter and shorter. How do we come to grips with this?

Aslam Sardar: I think you have to look at the problem in two parts. From an individual perspective, you have to constantly upgrade. The traditional thinking will be: “I must go for a two-day course or a one-day course.” Actually, you don’t need to.

There are a lot of sources of information available out there that you can easily tap and learn. There are free resources, for one. YouTube is actually a very good source. Even just reading is actually a good way to learn.

So my suggestion to everyone is to think of learning not in bulk-sized one-day courses, but rather in micro-learning, where you can acquire the knowledge quickly.

Training providers out there, perhaps one opportunity for you is to think about how can you break up your programmes into smaller bite-sizes, so that you can offer more micro-credentialised programmes for people to acquire learning quickly.

Now, at the corporation level, companies think: “I’ve got no time, no money, no people to come for training.” Actually, you don’t have to spend a lot of money.

In IHRP, we are not a big organisation, we are actually like an SME. We don’t have a big training budget, but I have to train my people, teach them and keep them engaged.

We have created this thing called ‘learning circles’. Every year, we adopt one book. We break the teams up into cross-functional teams, and every cross-functional team will adopt one chapter to teach everybody else. It was a very simple idea. It cost me nothing but buying the books.

You don’t have to think of upskilling in the traditional sense. Maybe a little bit of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking can make it very interesting for both the enterprise and the individual level.

Q: How comfortable are people with breaking down that barrier between strict specialised disciplines, in order to have this cross pollination? 

Aslam: This is where culture is very important. Because today, if you look at knowledge: if you are a specialist, you’ll have very deep knowledge. But the problems of the world today are actually not for the specialised. They are a very complex set of problems.

Let’s just take climate change, for example. How are you going to solve climate change? Technology alone cannot solve it. You need technology, you need science, you need to understand nature, you need to understand weather patterns. So you need to actually incorporate a multitude of knowledge.

Today, you must be multi-skilled and interdisciplinary. If you bring different individuals together from different departments, they learn from each other. When you start doing this, you start to build a learning culture. And that’s how you can have a lot more diffusion of knowledge across the organisation.

Q: In Microsoft’s Work Trend Index report, 88 per cent of leaders in Singapore say employees will need new skills to be prepared for the growth of AI. We have high demand and high expectations from employers. How can we meet that?

Lee Hui Li: There are four areas that you can look at. I call them the four Bs. You can always “buy”, as in, recruit. But it’s a very limited pool.

Number two, you have to start looking at reskilling, and build your own team, whether you have to upskill them or train them in different technology. That’s within your pool. 

The third one: For SMEs, there are a lot of questions like “Do I have time? Do I have the resources to do it?” You can not only buy and build, you can also borrow. “Borrow” means you can co-create and co-innovate.

I’ll give you an example of one of the SME customers that we have: Fong’s Engineering, which is in precision engineering. They’ve looked at how to automate in the last couple of years. How they did it was not just reskilling their team, but working with the private sector, like Microsoft. They also partnered with T-Systems, which is one of our business partners, and Singapore Polytechnic.

When we say borrow, (we mean) how you leverage the bigger ecosystem for you to drive digital transformation.

The fourth one, “bot”. Within your processes, you still have to automate and digitalise.

Tan: Actually, I think it is very good that 88 per cent of companies feel a certain gap, a certain need to upskill the workforce. Anecdotally, individual Singaporeans do also feel that need to upskill. That sort of constructive dissatisfaction with our portfolio of capabilities and skills – it bodes well for us, I think.

What we should overlay on that is the recognition that even if you’re in an industry that may be sunsetting, even if parts of your job are being automated, you have certain skills in that job or in that industry that may well be transferable, in combination with the new skills that you have.

You look at things like green finance, e-finance, green buildings… they speak to this need to combine a set of knowledge and a set of skills that you may have, with a new set of skills that you need to acquire.

It is something that if we can do well, can make the labour force a lot more flexible, a lot more versatile. Wherever the technology goes, however the economy goes, the Singaporean worker is always valuable because he can always take the opportunity.

Q: How important is the ESG (environmental, social, governance) conversation in terms of upskilling?

Tan: It’s important because we have an ageing workforce. An ageing workforce is also an experienced workforce, who have been in the fields of HR, finance, engineering or project management, for years.

And there is something to say about this experience, in terms of how I can use this background knowledge and look at a new tool, a new technology like generative AI, and think how I can fit that into my work.

If I’m working in customer service, I should know that better than someone who’s not been customer service, and that has to be an advantage. The question then is, how do I do that little bit of top-up, to learn and be familiar and confident with these new tools, to turn it into an advantage: both the experience and new knowledge.

Q: In the F&B and hospitality industry where it is high-touch, do automation and AI have a bearing on your operations and long-term plans?

Lee Kian Chong: It definitely has an impact. Training is not only about formal learning but can also be about informal learning, which will include things like on-job training (OJT).

There’s a new scheme, the Workplace Skills Recognition programme, which helps us to formally certify our people if they’ve gone through the relevant OJT within the company. 

And this means that our people don’t need to go out there to do formal learning: they can actually get certified in-house. When that happens, they actually have more time to be interfacing with their people, being trained on things like customer service by their manager. 

Digital transformation further complements these efforts because our people are able to free up a lot more time from various tasks, and refocus that time into building a lifelong learning culture and a culture of innovation.

Q: Investing in reskilling workers is a cost of retention. How does that compare to simply acquiring new workers?

LKC: Of course, we want to be retaining as much as possible. We want to grow and retain the talent so that they can occupy key senior positions within the company over time.

I would say that the cost of retention is lower. If you were to go out there to acquire, there are a lot of unknowns. When you work with people that are already within the organisation, we already know the skills demographics that we have.

We recently started working together with SkillsFuture on the Skills Profiling programme with JobKred, and that has helped us very much to understand what are the skills demographics within the organisation at any one point in time.

We can also align it to the skills framework, which we already use for our various hiring and performance appraisal purposes. We are then able to see the gaps within the organisation, and how we need to fill these gaps, with the various SkillsFuture programmes.

Once we have a good understanding of this, we’ll be able to understand how the cost of retention will actually look like, because we’ll know exactly what skills we need.

Q: Aslam, perhaps you might have some insights to share on the link between transformation and upskilling from an HR perspective?

Aslam: HR is at an interesting crossroads, where they can look at: How can I help drive business transformation through job redesign?

With automation coming on board, a lot of jobs, processes, workflows have to change. Some parts of the task could be automated; some parts, you may have to do it in a different way. You may need to apply a different kind of cognitive competency. So this is where I think HR plays a very important role.

Stanford did a study. For every dollar spent on machine learning technology, you need to spend nine dollars on human capital development. This goes to change management, training, reskilling, communicating and persuading your employees that this is good for them.

HR is really indispensable in this transformation narrative. So I would urge a lot of the business people out there: when you think of technology transformation, don’t forget change management and don’t forget that you need to bring the people with you.

LHL: Technology is not the challenge – it’s already available, and there’s a lot of support from government grants that’s helping our SMEs to embrace it.

How do we shift the mindset? From “Do I need to train, do I need to skill up” to “You have to do it if you want to stay relevant, because the competition now is going to be global.”

The businesses should think of it as: “How do I stay relevant by building a culture of innovation? Because that innovation has become so critical for my survival.”

For that, it can’t be top-down. You need the bottom-up, where the employees themselves feel that for their customers to stay with them, (they) have to stay relevant with this transformation. “I have to upskill myself – how to automate processes, how do I stay more relevant with the customers.”

Because if you don’t do it, you miss out. Because there will be other people doing it – not just in Singapore, they could compete in a global landscape. 

Having that culture of innovation is so critical, because that looks at skilling as an enabler. From “Should I do it? Should I not do it?” it becomes “I have to drive this culture of innovation for me to stay relevant”.

Even as an MNC, we are going through it. In Microsoft we have this culture of growth mindset. We look at every employee, doesn’t matter what level – you should not know it all, you should really learn it all.

It becomes: “Hey, for me to stay employable and relevant, I have to skill myself. Even at my level, I have to learn sustainability, what is AI. Maybe not to the deep level, but sufficiently to know that these are the trends.”

You just have to keep pacing yourself to stay relevant with the pace of technology innovations.

Aslam: If you just look back one year ago, the job title “prompt engineer” didn’t exist. On Sunday I went to check job opportunities for prompt engineers and saw 400.

But last night, I spoke to a friend and he said in a matter of months or years, maybe they will all not be relevant anymore. Because (the AI) Deep Mind is going to come up with a more capable technology.

With how technology is changing, jobs are going to change very fast, so you really have to stay very agile. So I thought that was a very good point: learn it all, as much as you can.

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