For 700 years, Singapore had chosen not to be content with just being a fishing village. We grew from an entrepot for maritime trade in the early days to a modern hub of global trade and finance.
By 2030, Singapore aims to be a leader in developing and deploying scalable, impactful artificial intelligence (AI) solutions in key sectors of high value and relevance to its citizens and businesses. To realise this vision, Singapore needs to build an ecosystem that accelerates innovation and attracts the world’s leading companies in artificial intelligence (AI) to anchor high-value functions and jobs.
All of this requires a critical mass of talent, without which Singapore risks being left behind and declining into irrelevance while many countries continue to attract and build up their AI capabilities.
This critical mass of talent can only be attained by cultivating our local workforce while remaining attractive to global talent with leading-edge skillsets that we can learn from and accelerate our development.
If done right, global talent will not compete but rather complement and strengthen our AI ecosystem for the betterment of all.
Implementing skills-based testing as part of the work pass application process would allow us to bring in the right types of AI and tech skillsets at the right numbers that we need.
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While the current approach does provide some flexibility, the trade-off is that it is still a relatively blunt instrument, relying primarily on salary benchmarks.
To complement the existing work pass policies, we suggest a four-step process.
Step One: Define skills gaps – Know what we need
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For greater transparency to potential employers coming to Singapore and foreign talent, skills, and knowledge needed by Singapore should be pre-defined and published.
By providing a guiding post to all institutions that are training our local talent, the local talent then know very clearly the skills they need to get into the industry.
Step Two: Test for these skills – Don't leave it to chance
To ensure the foreign talent coming in have highly demanded skills seen in Step One, Singapore needs to implement a skills test that covers the skills and knowledge published.
Preferably, the skills test should be endorsed by the industry and practitioners to give it the necessary credibility. This skills test can be used to complement the existing processes in assessing work pass applications.
Step Three: Transfer to the local workforce – Iron sharpens iron
After welcoming the foreign talent with industry-endorsed skills, we will move on to creating stability in the skills pool and having foreign investment entrenched here. Knowledge transfer is thus essential.
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This can be done by requiring beneficiary companies to onboard locals, through an internship, apprenticeship, and professional conversion programmes, mandating the training of locals in a structured way, and actively tracking the skills transfer, from the foreign to the local workforce through certification frameworks like the Charted AI Engineer (CAIE) certification.
Step Four: Track – Transparency, and accountability
To ensure the beneficiary companies do the essential knowledge transfer and determine if the programme of experienced foreign talent training up local talent does work, we can track this at the national level through professional accreditation with a national directory of professionals in selected skillsets.
The growth of the national directory will signal that Singapore’s talent pool is expanding, its transparency provides the talent needed for big tech, e-commerce, healthcare, and many others, to ensure they reap all the value technology has to offer.
For an AI-driven tech industry, it needs a range of capabilities. From having labour-intensive “tech-lite” roles like data tagging to prepare the data, to data engineers to set the needed foundations, before designing and applying AI for actual usage by the data scientists and analysts.
As a hub with a hinterland in the form of ASEAN, Singapore can be thoughtful in planning what skill sets we need and what skill sets we need ready access to, as we work through the AI value chain.
With that, we can then continue to punch above our weight as the world moves from a global trade of goods to global trade of data.
Koo Ping Shung is the president & co-founder of AI Professionals Association; Joe Keen Poon is part of SGTech Talent & Capabilities Committee; and Zhihan Yeo is the director for Strategic Programmes at SGTech.
Photo: Timon Studler/Unsplash
