Thisis an excelent aticle. It show exillent young Singaporean minds at work.

Juzt like that in teh Singapore newspeper nd telivision, nd the ledio.

Brillint!

(Pls don’t follow my lousi England)

A genuine knowledge-based economy would require a knowledge-based society.

This has been the constant refrain from most of the opposition parties but one that has fallen on deaf ears on the PAP’s camp. Knowledged-based in PAP’s context is nothing more than compliance to its phylosophy of ‘daddy-knows-best’.

Go to the WDA website and see the courses on offer. The list contains upgrading courses that are directly linked to the govt’s preset agenda of which industry it needs to fill up. Nothing worth looking at if you want to pursue a subject of your own interest.

In a downturn it becomes a case of ‘beggers cannot be choosers’. This is how the PAP govt treasures you. This is how they treat you under the pretext that they care for you.

So you see, it does not matter which level needs to go for skills upgrading or retraining. The question is why is this govt deciding for you? Do you want them to decide for you by limiting your options? This is so wrong.

One other thing, Eddie, you are prescribing along the line of tertiary education as a sort of guarantee toward long term employability, even in downturns. I don’t think it is as simple as that. Such a call is no different from the WDA telling us which course to pursue to fit into the scheme-of-things.

The one taking the course should be the one deciding which course he wants to pursue and these options must be made available to him. It is the government’s job to ensure that there is diversity in the acceptance of employment based on these educations. This is where it is lacking in SIngapore where each of us are being made to fit into a mould created for fit.

This is wrong.

>This is where it is lacking in SIngapore where each of us are being made to fit >into a mould created for fit.

I think this ‘mould’ arise out of a certain traditional and religious, even ancient, medieval or far eastern thinking. It is like a child or ‘boy’ have to grow up to be blah blah blah and a ‘girl’ have to grow up to be la la la. And there is like little or no room for those that do not quite fit into the ‘mould’. And for those who fit the ‘mould’, well and good, my blessings to them. I think it should not be an ‘either’ or ‘never’ situation. There should be some melting or defrosting of the ‘rigidity’ of the traditional thinking. Okay, I am not putting blame on any persons, I am just putting my thoughts online. Don’t tase me.

Hi Francis,

You are right about the boy blah blah blah and girl la lal la mentality. It is a traditional thing isn’t it? It actually proves the stage of mentality we are at. We might want to think we are more liberated than some of our Asian counterparts but truth be told, we are no more than an enslaved lot who are living like it was in medieval times.

Even when our own heritage and cultural roots were being destroyed right before our eyes (Mandarin campaign, no dialects), we simply went along with it, betraying our forefathers and denouncing our ancestry with it. We were and are so enslaved; and so proud of it.

We need to seriously consider, no, we need to seriously take back our identities and live the people that we are. We need to free ourselves from captivity. Why are we so happy with prison life when there is a world of freedom out there?

This is the re-training we need to look out for. Retrain ourselves with the ability to think, live and act for our own preferences. Not the training we are told to go for so that we can fit better into this prison call Singapore.

Maybe the headline needs some change?

Maybe something like “Stop giving Low Level Training”

The current headline i thought is stop training Workers who are currently belonging to Low Level Group.

This is Li Bai´s famous poem, Jin Ye Si (Thoughts of a Silent Night):

Chuang qian ming yue guang
Yi Shi di shang shuang
Ju tou wang ming yue
Di tou si gu xiang

English translation:
(Extracted from a Chinese poetry website in English language,
can be googled to find out which website it is.)

Before my bed
There is bright-lit moonlight
So that it seems
Like frost on the ground:

Lifting my head
I watch the bright moon
Lowering my head
I dream that I’m home.

—

I learnt this poem when I was a kid in school, but this is the first time I appreciate the beauty of this poem. It is a beautiful poem. The poem reflected the feeling of longingness to home and family. Just nice for this holiday seasons. Take heart, all things are temporary. The economic crisis will be over as a matter of time, and everything will be okay again, so please think on the positive side. Life is a gift.

An article with good suggestion but I think, with incorrect title. May be we are too get-used to blaming ‘them’ for everything ah?

We should not stop training workers but have to strengthen our efforts to provide tertiary education to our workers.

There are challenges in convincing people to take-up tertiary education which demands long term commitment. If you speak to any university (NTU/NUS) part-time course managers/professors they will tell you not many Singaporeans were not willing to enroll in their part-time programs during the boom years 2005-2007.

There are pros and cons having short term skills upgrading programs over tertiary education. Eddie has noted the disadvantages. But the advantages are 1) It is easier to get mature workers to sign-up and complete the programs. Remember their family commitments.

If I put it loosely, the short-Term skills upgrading are fructifera and tertiary education is lucifera.

I would like to suggest Eddie to visit WDA website to understand it is efforts on “Healthcare Professionals Conversion Programme (PCP) 3-year programme” .

That was a very good article and excellent suggestion/recommendation.

I would like to add:

I think it is the leaders in govt, especially the millionaire ministars, who are lacking behind very seriously in their sincerity and commitment in truly taking care of the welfare of the majority of the people.

Therefore, they are the ones who should also go for skills-upgrading in the serious business of soul-searching and really knowing how to feel, empathize, sympathize, and be compassionate and committed enough to do the right thing for the majority of the people, instead of only taking good care of the top echelons, the elites and scholars and foreign talents.

Over-nourishment for the brain while neglecting the body would lead to sudden strokes that may be require an artificial machine to keep the brain alive at a very high cost. This will not be sustainable in the long run and therefore can be detrimental to the nation as a whole in the future.

This present world economic and financial crisis is not only what they seems to be. It is in fact a serious crisis of confidence. Confidence in the leadership of both the private and public sectors. It is a clear indication of the failure of applying top-heavy rewards by paying exorbitantly to the CEOs while giving pittance to the lower ranks who are actually the ones who worked their guts out. This unfair, unjust and inequitable distribution of wealth is the key contributing factor that has led to the present state of affairs – a global crisis of confidence.

The credibility of the CEOs (who managed to pay themselves millions of dollars in salaries and bonuses but unable to keep their organizations afloat and having the need for bail-outs) is seriously at stake. That applies to both the private as well as the public sectors.

We, therefore, cannot now easily trust the words of people in leadership because they are the very ones who have actually let all of us down.

I would think the whole point is to keep the masses occupied. If you lose your job and have an upgrading course to keep you going (plus the HOPE that it might lead you to another job), then you wouldn’t be disgruntled enough to voice out your unhappiness. And when large numbers are kept occupied this way, a protest or demonstration can be easily avoided.

Within this perspective, the process of being enrolled in a course (whatever course, useful or useless as it may eventually be) is the purpose as opposed to the end result of said course. If you’re kept busy looking at your feet, then you wouldn’t have the time to see the bigger picture and form opinions, isn’t it….

PS>> By the way, excellent analogy – ‘…make Singaporeans into low-quality Swiss knives…’.

At the risk of being politically incorrect, not everyone is cut out for tertiary education. If they were retrenched from low-level manufacturing jobs, what makes you think they can cope with tertiary level work? A factory worker can’t suddenly start writing essays just because you provide him with a university education. If they fail their exams and cannot graduate in the end, it would be a waste of their time and of public funds.

Secondly, even if they graduate with a piece of paper, that does not guarantee them a management job or even job security. They will still have to compete with all the other graduates. If they couldn’t land a management level job before undergoing university education, what makes you think educating them will magically make them superior to those who had already graduated long ago and have decades of experience under their belts? You seem to believe that there is an infinite supply of management level jobs that can be filled by all who qualify. In reality, mid-level managers get retrenched too, even if they have a degree.

Finally, where will the government get the money to provide tertiary education for low-level workers? How will these students support their families in the mean time? Your proposal is merely an exercise in impractical utopian thinking if it does not consider these issues.