Though automation has often been blamed for putting traditional jobs at risk of disappearance, it is ironically this same wave of technological innovation that could lead a jobs recovery — at least within the Singapore economy. Lin of McKinsey says that the need to quicken the pace of digitalisation following Covid-19 will ultimately lead to net job creation as tech firms experience greater demand for labour to drive their expansion. These new jobs, she observes, will leverage digitalisation, data and everything that comes with these trends.
Naturally, re-training will be key for the present workforce to build the requisite skills needed for them to perform these jobs. By virtue of tending to be higher skilled roles, retraining to take up such positions promise higher wages to workers who re-equip themselves with the necessary competencies to fill these roles. As the demand for these “digital jobs” increases with the digitalisation of the economy, the need to reskill workers will only accelerate, necessitating the rapid transformation of the workforce to ensure readiness for the new economy.
“The need for societies to shift labor rapidly across industry boundaries is likely to increase in importance as industries are upended in the aftermath of the immediate crisis. Societies around the world should be thinking about how they can accelerate these shifts through reskilling programs,” notes an article by Albrecht Enders, Lars Haggstrom and Rafael Lalive in the Harvard Business Review.
The article further cites the example of Sweden, where a consortium of private firms and public sector organisations came together to develop a rapid re-skilling programme over a matter of days and weeks, developing strong labour market flexibility that allows it to quickly adapt to regular changes in labour demand from the market.
Currently, retraining is typically subject to significant time lags. Lin argues that the present 18 to 24 months re-training period is not efficient enough to either meet demand for critical roles or workers’ need to earn an income. To realise the speed and efficiency of the Swedish model, she suggests that firms adopt a skills-oriented “boot-camped” approach that is skilled to specific future jobs. US telco AT&T, she says, has used this approach to shorten its retraining process to just six to 12 weeks, equipping workers with just enough new skills for new jobs.
The goal, Lin argues, is not to reskill a worker to rush them into a new role immediately, but rather to get them on a “skills ladder” and have them gradually reorient their skillset towards new roles. She emphasises that retraining should be primarily geared towards specific technologies and functions rather than a “one-size fit all”. Even Singapore’s Skillsfuture movement is getting in on the act, with the national skills movement shifting away from a standard set of generic courses to offerings better-tailored to the needs of particular businesses.
Vinayak says ideally retraining should not be separate from work but rather be an integral part of the culture of a business. Instead of seeing retraining as something that workers must take time off work to perform, he argues that firms should develop a learning culture and actively encourage workers to familiarise themselves with technology as part of their day-to-day operations. Leading Singaporean bank DBS, for example, is encouraging its workers to learn how to code and issuing bite-sized reinforcement learning online courses for all its staff — including CEO Piyush Gupta himself.
Ensuring that employment recovers from the Covid-19 crisis in this way will be key to ensuring a wider economic recovery, since only with gainful employment will consumers feel confident enough to consume once again. Fortunately, Vinayak observes that self-oriented reskilling of the workforce has started to happen much more quickly — though still at an insufficient speed — as years worth of digital transformation happens within a few days in the wake of the pandemic. Workers are realising that reskilling is needed to take up higher value jobs, which the McKinsey senior partner says have higher competition and therefore leads to higher consumption.
Skills of the future
The experts highlight two particular skills that will prove essential in the post-Covid-19 economy — innovation and analytics. The need for innovation within a disrupted economy is clear, with McKinsey partners Daniel Cohen, Brian Quinn, and Erik Roth arguing that innovation can unlock strong new sources of sustainable growth for businesses amid ever-rising growth expectations. “Over time, periods where there were a lot of influential patents were followed by periods of high productivity growth,” says Dimitris Papanikolaou of the Kellogg School of Management.
Abidali Neemuchwala, CEO of leading Indian IT services firm Wipro, agrees. “Increasingly, the ability to select the kinds of innovation projects to pursue, and incorporate their power quickly, is becoming not just a way to create a competitive advantage but may be the only sustainable competitive advantage,” he writes in a thought piece for the World Economic Forum (WEF). Business leaders, he says, must develop creative and improvisational thinking skills as well as the ability to develop an innovation strategy to remain competitive in a digital economy.
This is a skill that Singaporean workers and business leaders urgently need to develop — despite ostensibly being the third most innovative city in the world, Singaporean workers and businesses are often described as risk-averse and lacking in creativity. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has even commented that Apple’s immensely-popular products could not have been developed within the constraints of Singapore’s business culture. Fortunately, steps have increasingly been taken to improve innovation in Singapore including reducing emphasis on examinations and establishing start-up incubators at universities to nurture the efforts of student entrepreneurs.
Such creativity, however, must also be paired with a rigorous mastery of data analytics as data becomes the cornerstone of the digital economy. Yet, Vinayak notes that most companies may encounter difficulties capturing value from data analytics, in part because many do not know what are the most valuable use cases for this powerful new tool, as well as due to a shortage of talented individuals who are able to operate increasingly sophisticated data analytics systems. Most significant of all, firms face challenges integrating data analytics into operational protocols.
“I would think that [data analytics] is a priority and most organisations are starting to wake up to that. But it is going to be the next wave of growth where organisations can capture value from data analytics,” says Vinayak. The rewards for those that succeed are immense. A PwC report observes that businesses with strong data analytic capabilities (about 4% of all firms) are twice as likely to fall into the top quartile of performance for their industries. The ability to spot trends within data unobserved by less data literate competitors could give data-savvy firms a leg up.
Naturally, the Singapore government has gotten in on the act in a bid to ensure a data-ready workforce. Data analytics has been identified as one of eight priority and emerging skill areas to be taught to local workers under the Skillsfuture training programme. Singaporeans and permanent residents can enjoy up to 70% subsidies for Skillsfuture courses under these eight priority areas, ensuring that such reskilling opportunities are widely available throughout the domestic workforce. “The world is facing a reskilling emergency. More than one billion jobs, almost one-third of all jobs worldwide, are likely to be transformed by technology in the next decade,” warns World Economic Forum managing director Saadia Zahidi. In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, the day of reckoning for obsolete professions will likely come sooner rather than later.
