2. Recommendations for greater broad-based appreciation of non-permanent

3. How can the learning of non-permanent workers be supported and enhanced?

In addition to the 97 non-permanent workers interviewed, we interviewed and spoke with stakeholders such as employers, policy makers, career coaches and representatives from industry bodies such as professional organisations. Stakeholder perspectives were also gathered in the reference group sessions we conducted towards the end of each study where we sought their inputs and responses to our interpretations as they explored the implications of our findings. Which stakeholders were involved in the additional interviews and in the reference groups and how many was sector-dependent. More details are provided inspecific reports. The interviewees were selected based on purposive and convenience sampling (Lankshear & Knobel, 2004) to obtain a range of job roles, gender and years of experience. As is typical of qualitative research, the sampling is not representative of the population. As the population is not currently defined or captured statistically, a representative sample would not have been possible, had we desired to draw the sample in this way. Conducting some 30 interviews per occupational group, however, resulted in “saturation” of the data where common stories and themes were being expressed by the participants. All informants were guaranteed anonymity and we used pseudonyms. We also sought out former and returning non-permanent workers to capture comparative perspectives. Participants were identified through industry contacts, personal contacts of the research team, advertisements and snowballing with an eye on our selection criteria. All interviews were recorded and transcribed before being imported into a qualitative software package (NVIVO). Themes were developed through reading the data, referring back to the literature and multiple coding by various members of the research team. Each transcript was then coded by the established themes before being further analysed into sub-themes.

1.4.1. Profile of our non-permanent worker respondents

The profile of the non-permanent workers we interviewed is varied as indicated by the Figures 1 – 5. The breakdown of respondents by sector or occupations is at Figure 1. Our respondents were undertaking non-permanent work across the age groups (Figure 2). Notably, Adult Educators are predominantly between 40 – 64 years of age, reflecting the need to have existing work experience before becoming an Adult Educator. There were fewer creative workers beyond the age of 49, perhaps indicative of the heavy work and often gruelling hours. Low wage respondents are spread across the age groups. The ethnicity of our respondents is somewhat of the population at large (Figure 3). Notably however, is the large number of Adult Educators who are Chinese, compared to proportions in our sample who are Malay or Indian. In the creative and low wage sectors, our respondents are more evenly spread across the different ethnicities that are dominant in Singapore. In terms of gender, the larger number of males in our sample is reflective of the gender distribution in the creative and low wage industry sectors (Figure 4). Adult Educators are more evenly distributed. In terms of educational qualifications, Adult Educators in our sample are the group that holds post-graduate qualifications as would be