Supporting workers with skills development, career guidance
Companies should work with employees to bridge skills gaps and identify job opportunities while meeting their business needs
Panellists
- Dilys Boey, chief executive, Workforce Singapore
- Lim Minhan, head of consulting, Ensign InfoSecurity
- Jedrick Tan, chief executive officer, Fei Siong FastFood (Popeyes PLK Singapore)
- Gloria Arlini, chief operating officer and country lead, Generation Singapore
- Moderator: Lee Su Shyan, associate editor (news), The Business Times
These are edited excerpts of the roundtable.
Q: As employers, how easy is it to identify the skills that are needed?
Jedrick Tan: For the food and beverage (F&B) industry, and our own organisation’s hiring practices, we tend to gravitate to skills-based hiring for the majority of job roles. That’s probably underpinned by the nature of the industry.
Skills-based hiring has multiple benefits. It allows us to access a wider pool of talent. There will be instances of talent with no academic records or academic transcripts, or they may be from very diverse backgrounds and have degrees that are not relevant. Focusing on their skills and ability to perform the task enables us to open up to such talent.
Secondly, having industry-recognised skill certifications will help us further streamline our hiring process.
Hiring managers and business owners hiring for “hot jobs” may receive hundreds of applicants. A lot of time is spent sieving out the relevant talent.
With industry certifications and a common benchmark of skills, we can filter our talent pool and focus on other skill sets we deem important. For example, soft skills, individual values, and whether they are aligned to your company’s motto and values.
For the F&B industry, we are not as developed in terms of professional certs, compared to other industries. So having an industry-recognised cert for the F&B industry is something we may need to tackle as an ecosystem.
Q: How does Workforce Singapore help companies with their manpower needs?
Dilys Boey: One way I would encourage employers is to think about your current workforce, because their jobs are going to change. They have different aspirations. Is there potential to move them from a cold job into a hot job? A lot of that requires tweaking a little bit of the job, redesigning the job, and of course upskilling comes into play.
The second is hiring a little bit more broadly. While skills recognitions are important, when you hire, do you look more broadly? Maybe an individual who comes from a totally different job could bring skills that are relevant?
The third one is to deal with the mismatch of expectations and interests. If we are going to have longer career lifespans, invariably we’re not going to hold the same career for life.
There is a need to help people navigate their choices through career guidance and career advisory. How do we inject that through organisations? How do they make that more available to individuals?
And how do we help individuals take ownership of their own career planning so that they can decide on the different pathways and which skills they need to adopt?
Q: How should workers be encouraged to face a structural skills mismatch?
Gloria Arlini: There are multiple components to it. There are the expectations of the jobseekers. If they are existing employees, then it is about what jobs they expect to upskill into. On the other hand, what jobs do the company expect them to be upskilled into? Therein lies the tension.
When it comes to dealing with adult learners, the question is: how do we recognise the psyche and the headspace of these individuals? It is a completely different perspective in terms of how we approach learning and education back in school, and how we are doing it by upskilling or reskilling.
This ties back quite nicely into the micro-credential scheme shared earlier (by Minister for Education Chan Chun Sing).
For employees, the way they see time is really in bursts, so flexibility is key. Being able to break down the content into something that is bite-sized, or something as simple as making it mobile-friendly, really allows people to make the best of those bursts of time.
Q: Some jobseekers may have certain skills but lack others. Is needing to train these workers an obstacle to hiring?
Lim Minhan: I would argue that actually, this works for a mid-careerist. For example, having done presentations to management before, they would understand that sometimes technical-speak does not go well with management. These are the (soft) skill sets that we value.
For employees who face a technical skills gap, you have to sacrifice personal time to level up yourself. Employers can do their part by allocating protected time for training and by providing mentorship.
Boey: We shouldn’t underestimate some of the other HR practices that perhaps need to change to enable companies to hire a different profile. If your HR practices do not progress with the expectations of individuals – that could be a form of mismatch.
Q: How can we support your employees’ long-term career health?
Boey: Essentially, this involves making sure people are pro-active with respect to their mid-term and longer-term career plans.
More importantly, it is making sure they take the steps to navigate through those pathways, primarily through upskilling and getting the right advice from career advisors.
But to enable this, we want to make sure there’s access to the information. How do you know where the new opportunities are? Where are the growth areas? And what are the skills required in order for you to take on those pathways?
We’re working with employers on some enablers to see how we can uplift HR and line manager capabilities to build career-healthy workforces. This includes trying out digital tools such as the Skills Profiler and working with different trade associations and chambers.
While there is a focus on careers, we cannot ignore ancillary factors such as employees having different expectations and motivations, including work-life balance.
Considering these motivations, how can we look at jobs differently? Beyond offering flexible work arrangements, can we componentise or fractionalise work such that we can match skills with personal aspirations a little bit better?
Tan: We take a three-pronged approach at Popeyes, where we look at the individual’s career development, skills development and mental well-being. The communications between the employer, the organisation and employee is also critical.
Every individual has different needs and expectations of their career health. Some people want work-life balance, while others want financial stability or progression.
From an employer’s lens, alignment with employees is very important. We have a lot of engagement sessions with them.
Under our career development pillar, we offer structured career progression pathways for our employees to grow with us, whether vertically or laterally. This is intertwined with performance and incentive management.
For employees looking to progress further, we will put them through structured training programs under our skills development pillar. We have a skills assessment academy at Popeyes – for instance, a restaurant manager in training will need to go through different stages to be certified.
Q: How can we predict what skills will be relevant in the future?
Boey: There are many consulting companies and academics that try to make these predictions five to 10 years ahead.
The government also plays a big role in helping organisations understand what these potential trends are. This includes introducing industry transformation maps that set about how industries could potentially transform, and job transformation maps.
Meanwhile, the SkillsFuture Report talks about emerging skills, and that enables the training ecosystem to develop the programmes accordingly.
IBM has said that the lifespan of skills and jobs today is almost five years. The pace of change is so quick that we need to constantly remain agile to navigate these changes.
Perhaps every employer and individual needs to have a five-year lookout where they ask themselves: “What do I have today as a base, and how would that carry me through what could potentially be obsolete tomorrow?”
Q: How can we resolve a mismatch in expectations between workers and employers?
Arlini: We were often asked as kids, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” That has moulded us to believe that there should be one ideal career we should aspire towards. But sometimes that doesn’t pan out, and people get crushed.
Notwithstanding this shortening of skill-sets to a span of five years, it means that individuals need to be prepared to be flexible.
If the opportunity calls and is something you can see yourself doing – despite not having initially envisioned this for yourself – then perhaps it is something worth taking a shot on.
We always tell our learners to be open-minded. For example, career transitioners may come in with an idea of the role they want to be in; they may say, “I want to be in tech”.
But do you know what that is? When you make a pivot into tech, do you know how much you need to unlearn and relearn?
Having that perspective, maturity and flexibility, especially for mid-careerists, would complement what employers are also trying very hard to do – which is to clearly map out the progressions and pathways that are open to individuals.
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