During his speech at the Singapore Institute of Management’s (SIM) inaugural Future of Work series, Minister for Education Chan Chun Sing observed that workers who “demonstrate creativity” and can “collaborate effectively” across borders and disciplines to create value will be in greater demand.
This was one of the two trends the minister noted in the midst of the fast-changing nature of work these days.
“For industries, the speed of evolution is key,” he adds. “Talent and skills are the real enablers and not credentialism.”
Furthermore, the market’s emphasis on relevance and “currency of skills, experiences” and connections will only continue to grow, Chan points out.
He adds that these days, the competition for jobs is not based on geographical location or the physical concentration of manpower specifically. Now, the competition for jobs and the creation of good paying jobs is increasingly based on an individual’s ability to pool talent, mobilise capital and protect intellectual property through “a talent network across borders, time and space”.
Further to his speech, Chan said that individuals and industries must now go beyond “learning yesterday’s solutions to yesterday’s problems”, or today’s solutions to today’s problems for that matter.
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“We need our students and our learners to anticipate and understand tomorrow’s challenges, frame them properly and seek the solutions for tomorrow’s challenges ahead of time,” he says. “Hence, it is not about answering yesterday’s challenges with yesterday’s solutions, which will not give us the premium in the labour market.”
As today’s rapidly changing business models and technologies mean that no amount of frontloading will adequately prepare workers for the ever-changing work environment, Chan notes that the individual’s ability to learn, unlearn and relearn is more important than just the acquisition of prior, known knowledge.
Instead, the ability to frame new problems and seek new solutions ahead of time, as well as creating new solutions through connecting and collaborating with others, will command a premium.
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Beyond the individual, industries must also look forward and beyond focusing on individuals’ credentials.
“The workplace has traditionally recognised degrees or diplomas as proxies for competencies and skills. This in itself is not irrelevant. But, it has to go beyond that,” he says. “Today, qualifications continue to have a place, as a signal of proficiencies in specific domains. But broad degrees and diplomas are no longer adequate to signal relevance and currency for specific skillsets.”
The skills and knowledge of employees will need to be “topped up” regularly; relevant degrees and diplomas must increasingly be complemented by modular courses that can “plug skills gaps in a timely manner”, he adds.
“It is the continuous process of improving oneself and developing the appropriate skillsets that keeps us relevant,” he continues. “Beyond just searching for the right person, companies must increasingly look at developing the right person to strengthen its own talent pipelines.”
Going beyond a “local-foreign” mindset is also key, says Chan.
“While that itself remains an important consideration for the management of many social issues, it is not the biggest challenge for companies and countries.
“Instead, our bigger challenge is how wide and how deep a talent network a company or country can command, to determine our speed of evolution to outrun the competition. This is because the nature of work, especially for high value add work, is no longer confined to a specific geographical locality,” he adds.
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As the work-learning continuum changes, Chan notes that institutions should go beyond being an education institution to being a lifelong learning partner.
“Education institutions must… evolve in their role as partners to the learners and companies,” he says.
“Our institutions must nurture the culture of lifelong learning in our learners from early on, to sensitise our students to shortened career cycles, and the need to constantly upgrade themselves,” he stresses.
Institutions must also partner with industries in their transformation journeys by providing “just in time, specific training modules” for workers to enable the industry transformation to take place, he says.
At the same event, Sir James Dyson, founder of Dyson Limited, echoed Chan’s sentiments, saying that learning never stops.
Sir James Dyson at SIM's inaugural Future of Work Series. Photo: SIM
“As we get older, our pace of learning needs to increase. And so-called ‘workplaces’ are really places for problem-solving, creativity, collaboration, research and most importantly, continuous learning,” he says in his speech at the forum.
“The future of work and the future of education is one and the same. Education is a never-ending continuum,” he adds.
