Executive Summary This is the first national study to gather baseline information about the organisations and professionals working in the Training and Adult Education (TAE) sector, including their profile, practices and challenges, as well as the impact of government policies and initiatives on them. Data was collected via face to face survey from July 2017 to May 2018. Follow-up focus group discussion was conducted in January and February 2019 to complement the questionnaire survey and probe deeper and on some of the themes that emerged from the questionnaire data. Key findings include: Training providers’ (TPs) profile TAE training providers offer a wide range of programmes and could be categorised into two major types namely, WSQ training providers and non-WSQ training providers. Close to 95% of the TP respondents are small-medium enterprises with less than 200 employees. Almost half (45.8%) of these had less than 10 employees. •
About 64% of the TPs had a yearly turn-over of less than $1 million. Almost 30% of TPs earned between $1mil and less than $10mil.
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94% (n=305) of TPs in Singapore were locally owned, among which 18.7% (n=57) have international presence or subsidiary / branch in other countries.
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A third of the TPs were progressive in adopting up-to-date1 technologies, leading the way in developing new products, highly customising their products and services to client’s needs, and having least dependency on price to gain competitive success.
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At least half of the TPs reported increase in client satisfaction, revenue, profitability, employees learning new skills and spending on innovation and technology over the last 12 months. In terms of business outlook, more than half of the TPs expect to increase their revenue in the next 12 months, while less than 15% of TPs expect a decrease in revenue over the same period.
TAE professionals’ profile
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There are mainly three groups of TAE professionals, namely the adult educators (AEs), training management professionals (TMs), and human resource developers (HRDs). The AEs’ main work includes curriculum design, training facilitation, assessment, and the learning & performance consultancy (such as linking learning to business outcomes, identifying skills gaps, reducing gaps / lapse in business processes, analysing organisational business needs and indicators of business performance). TMs oversee training management that includes programme management, manpower, training resources, quality assurance, compliance and administration. HRDs build employee capacity and human capital to support business needs. This includes learning and development, talent management, performance management, organisational development and human resource planning and implementation.
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There were about 40% AEs working as full-time staff in training organisations. Almost 30% were freelancers, and 22% were industry practitioners who work in sectors other than the TAE sector but doing training/education-related work as a secondary role.
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More than 70% of AEs and TMs performed more than one role in their work, while 65% of HRDs performed more than one role in their work. Major functional roles for AEs include training facilitation, assessment, curriculum design and development, training/learning needs analysis, and administration. However, we found only a small proportion of TAE professionals perform specialised tasks, for example, only 25% of AEs are providing learning
Up-to-date learning technology include but not exclusive to: augmented realities, virtual realities, learning management systems, artificial intelligence, etc.
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