S$10m for jobs transformation maps to study impact of tech on jobs: Josephine Teo

THE government is setting aside close to S$10 million over the next two years to work out jobs transformation maps (JTM) to help companies with their workforce planning, Manpower Minister Josephine Teo said.

So far, JTMs in three sectors - human resources, logistics and financial services - have been completed, with plans for another 12, Mrs Teo said in Parliament during her ministry's Committee of Supply debate on Wednesday.

The 12 sectors include wholesale trade, retail and food manufacturing.

In the case of the logistics sector, an inter-agency team including the Economic Development Board, Enterprise Singapore and Workforce Singapore in 2019 studied the impact of Industry 4.0 on the sector in the next three to five years, the minister said.

The study systematically identified how 56 existing job roles will evolve, and 12 new job roles will emerge.

"It turns out, more than half of existing logistics jobs will experience a medium to high degree of change," she sad, adding that logistics companies are taking reference from the findings to invest in new systems and reskill their staff.

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In response to a follow-up question from Desmond Choo, Tampines GRC Member of Parliament and chair of the Government Parliamentary Committee for Manpower, Mrs Teo said the technologies that are expected to have an impact on jobs in the logistics sector are Internet of Things, augmented reality, virtual reality and block chain.

This is different from the financial services industry, which would see an impact from artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and advanced analytics on 121 identified job roles.

"The key really is that when we speak very broadly about the impact of technology, we don't recognise sufficiently that the impact on specific industries and specific job roles depends very much on which technology we're talking about," she said.

"The value of these kinds of studies is to look very specifically within a foreseeable time frame, technologies that will make a key difference to help the companies transform the jobs and to reskill their workers," she added.

At the same time, the government is expanding the Productivity Solutions Grant to support job redesign, with the subsidy raised to 80 per cent.