Drive to boost infrastructure talent with mid-career PMETs

Singapore

INTERNATIONAL Enterprise (IE) Singapore is launching a new programme to match and train mid-career professionals for the infrastructure sector.

The move aims to bolster the local talent pool in a sector that has to-date been fairly reliant on foreign talent.

It is also to help Singaporeans build specific, customised skill sets so that companies can take part in overseas infrastructure projects, amid an expected boom in project volume in Asia.

The Professional Conversion Programme (PCP) for Global Ready Infrastructure Talent (GRIT) aims to train PMETs (professionals, managers, executives and technicians) with skills in areas such as infrastructure project financing, project transactional advisory and project engineering for global infrastructure projects.

Under the programme, professionals who want to make mid-career switches will undergo structured on-the-job training under the guidance of experienced mentors in infrastructure companies. These companies can be local enterprises and multinational corporations based in Singapore.

The programme targets people who have graduated for at least two years.

It lasts for 12 to 18 months, during which time Workforce Singapore will subsidise up to 70 per cent of participants' salaries, capped at S$4,000 per month, for newly hired trainees who are Singapore citizens below 40 and currently employed.

For those above 40 or unemployed, the subsidy climbs to 90 per cent of monthly salaries, capped at S$6,000 per month.

Minister for Trade and Industry (Industry) S Iswaran announced this at the seventh Asia-Singapore Infrastructure Roundtable. He said: "I am happy to note that since the soft launch of the programme as a pilot in the second quarter of 2017, we have seen participation from 12 companies who have already committed to take in 30 PMET candidates."

He gave examples of participants who used to be in sectors such as real estate and even food and beverage, now emplaced in and undergoing training with companies such as local water treatment firms Yamato Technologies and Darco Water Technologies.

This effort is done partly in response to IE Singapore's 2016 Internationalisation Survey, which revealed that Singapore firms face a lack of talent with global experience and specific skill sets.

IE Singapore CEO Lee Ark Boon, in a statement, said: "Currently, we do not have enough local talent as project development and structuring is cross-disciplinary and complex."

In an interview with The Business Times, Kow Juan Tiang, group director for environmental and infrastructure solutions at IE Singapore, agreed, adding that this is why the programme is not designed as coursework conducted in classrooms, but out in the field.

While the NUS School of Design and Environment has its postgraduate programme in infrastructure project management, which includes modules on financial structuring, law, business and civil engineering, nothing beats real-world experience, especially for a sector as knowledge-intensive and multi-disciplinary as infrastructure, he said.

Infrastructure professionals need three things: financial, technical and regulatory knowledge; universities tend to train undergraduates in only one of the three.

An oft-cited figure from the Asian Development Bank says that Asia will require S$2.3 trillion of infrastructure investments annually from 2016 to 2030, although Mr Kow leans towards the conservative side and believes that only 10-20 per cent of this will materialise due to political obstacles and other challenges.

At the event, Darco also signed a memorandum of understanding with InfraCo Asia Development, a commercially managed infrastructure development company, to work on a design-build-own-operate model for four municipal water treatment projects in Vietnam.

IE Singapore facilitated their partnership. Investments for these 50-year concession projects total around S$50 million.