Tan Kok Yam Shares SSG’s Role in Enabling Transformation

From Informed to Transformed: How to Get There?

TAN KOK YAM

Chief Executive, SkillsFuture Singapore Earliest Tech Experience: Handheld game Octopus Currently Playing: Total War: Three Kingdoms (very distractedly and intermittently) Was Reading: Chinese Science Fiction (translated version; started during the pandemic) Currently Watching: Animated series Arcane (with daughter) App You Can’t Live Without: Google Maps for getting around, and various newsfeeds Favourite Way to Relax: Running (just picked up in the last few months) Pet Topic at the Moment: Soccer (FIFA World Cup) – supporter for the England team

Transformation is a buzzword these days. Yet, even as businesses and professionals acknowledge its importance and necessity, the truly transformed are few and far between. What does it take to tilt the balance so that the informed become transformed? Mr Tan Kok Yam, Chief Executive, SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG), explains to The IT Society how physics has a part to play in this and why transformation should not be an end.

Q: Question, KY: Kok Yam

Q: What is causing the pushback for businesses to go from informed to transformed?

KY: Just like what is stated in Newton’s second law – the bigger the object’s mass, the more force is needed to shift it from its trajectory – we have to recognise that transformation is not just about shifting one person or one job role. It is a process involving the whole company, and potentially the company’s business partners. We may think that large organisations have the scale and resources but their processes are also more complex. Meanwhile, small and medium-sized organisations confront the opposite conundrum.

Then we have the brick-and-mortar businesses and highly regulated industries. For the brick-and-mortar, they need to figure out which business processes can or cannot be digitalised. As for the latter, their pace of digitalisation is dependent on how enlightened the regulators are. One good example is in the banking sector where the role of the regulator, i.e. the Monetary Authority of Singapore, is instrumental in driving the industry’s digital transformation pace.

At the end of the day, Singapore is an open economy so businesses generally can’t really choose to sit out of digital transformation. It is risky and growthlimiting to do otherwise.

Q: What about for professionals, is it an option for them to opt out of transformation?

KY: Again, sitting out of digitalisation will limit a working person’s options quite severely – and it will get worse with time. In the Skills Demand for the Future Economy Report 2022 published in November, we identified significant career growth opportunities in three areas – digital, green and care. The trends of digitalisation and sustainability cut across every industry and business. You can sense it even in the language and vocabulary being used, that there is a demand for new skills to be layered onto existing ones – so not just finance but fintech and green financing; not just facilities management but smart facilities management.

Therefore it is not just the professionals seeking new pastures in growth areas who need to reskill and upskill; professionals looking to progress in their existing fields should also proactively seek to enhance their skills and knowledge in tech, in green, and in other areas.

As a society, I think we should be confident of our own capacity to upskill and to be inventive. During the pandemic, challenging as it was, we discovered that many of us have the capacity to learn new skills and behaviours, and embrace changes, even at short notice – whether it is the hawker who now sells his char kway teow online or the 70-year-old grandma who became proficient in scanning the SafeEntry QR code.

Q: What is SSG doing to help businesses and professionals with the transformation?

KY: Our baseline is to make sure that continuing education is accessible and affordable for all. Besides SkillsFuture Credit, we also work closely with training providers to achieve that.

In addition, SSG is actively bolstering our collective ability to identify and develop emerging skills through using analytics and leveraging support from partners like SCS and other trade associations and professional bodies. By identifying important skills sets and sharing it with organisations and learners, we empower them to make better choices and invest in the relevant areas of upskilling for themselves.

To ensure that these trends are current and relevant to the context of companies and individuals, we are also building a network of SkillsFuture Queen Bees – industry leaders who know their sector and industry well, and can aggregate the specific skills needs across different companies.

Finally, we are investing in raising the quality of training delivery. Adult learners have many commitments and are timestarved. It is therefore important that we make the training effective – by keeping it bite-sized, online if possible, so that learners can study at their own pace in a deliberate, disciplined manner, towards achieving micro-credentials, for example. Also, we need to make better use of the workplace as a classroom where learning can be more directly applied to the environment, structures and contexts of work.

Q: What can businesses and professionals do to help themselves?

KY: I think for businesses, it starts with the recognition that certain things cannot be fully outsourced. For example, they may outsource IT projects, but they cannot quite outsource the thinking of their digitalisation strategy. Similarly, while SSG can help identify market trends and work with businesses to distil implications, businesses ultimately have to decide for themselves what their focus and priorities are.

Similarly, professionals need to continuously review the changing environment, ask themselves what their aspirations, their strengths and perhaps shortcomings are. The individual, alongside his/her employer, best knows his/her own upskilling needs, with Government sharing information, and ensuring that the options to upgrade are available and affordable.

“There is a general recognition that industry and the nature of work will continue to change very fast. This is a challenge, no doubt, but I believe that if we have a skilled and flexible workforce, we can in fact thrive in such a dynamic environment, through adaptation and inventiveness, making the best of the situation. As individuals and as a society, we will need to invest continuously in learning new things and upskilling, and celebrating our different skill sets and expertise. Then we can build that breadth and depth in our national ‘bench strength’, to succeed collectively, and turn challenge into opportunity.”

What would you say to encourage someone to pursue upskilling? If there is an area which you would like to improve your skills in, what will it be?

What would you say to encourage a business owner to send his/ her people for training?

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