Eddie Choo, Youth Focus - Monday, December 22, 2008 14:14 - 10 Comments

Stop training low-level workers, WDA

By Eddie Choo / Youth Writer

Has anyone seen the recent Workforce Development Authority (WDA) advertisement? It is the one which showed a middle-aged man in his forties with his wife, as well as a group of friends of various races, sitting together in the coffeeshop.

One by one, his friends disappear as they talked about how they got new jobs after taking courses by WDA to upgrade their skills or learn new ones. Eventually, even the wife disappears, leaving the man behind. The point made in the advertisement is rather clear: Go for skill-upgrading courses with WDA and get a job. If not, you might remain unemployed.

All of these might seem appropriate in the context of the recession that is happening. Retrenched low-level workers are advised to take up skills-upgrading courses in order to improve their chances of employment. However, these skill-upgrading courses still cause the Singaporean worker to remain in the manufacturing industry – the area most vulnerable to retrenchments in times of recession.

Data from the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) shows that during the peak of the recession, 57,5 people per 1000 were retrenched in 1998, compared to the services industry, which saw 18.5 per 1000 people retrenched.

Singaporeans deserve better offers than these – in particular, not the low quality jobs that would be especially vulnerable to shifts in the economy, because in a depression, all jobs get affected. In a recession, the best way to spark future growth is by creating high-quality jobs that give Singaporeans security in a recession.

The basic idea for skills upgrading is that the productivity and value of the worker would increase. This might lead to better profit margins for the employer and even pay increment for the worker. The concept sounds reasonable in theory. However, while skills upgrading might seem to be the good thing to do, I have concerns about this approach towards improving the well-being of the Singaporean worker.

We remain an export-driven economy, where we rely heavily on our manufacturing prowess and efficiency, as well as our connectivity to the rest of the world through shipping links. Such thinking is antithetical to the concept of the ‘knowledge-based economy’, a phrase that has been overused so much to the point of being cliché. There is a genuine need to continue developing a knowledge-based economy.

Such an economy would still be innovating even in a recession, because ideas do not follow the trends of market, but the flow of information within a society, something that is not dependent on whether the market is going up or down. A genuine knowledge-based economy would require a knowledge-based society.

The point is not that the WDA is doing a bad job of giving people the opportunities and resources to upgrade their skills improve their employability. Rather, it is that there is a failure of imagination in the provision of these skills. Giving Singaporeans low-quality skills does not help them during a recession. These low-quality jobs tend to be the ones that get retrenched first. The point is not to make Singaporeans into low-quality Swiss knives, but to make every Singaporean a sharp sword, of high quality and value.

What the WDA could look at is to see how they can provide people with the education at the tertiary level so that they will be able to work at higher levels of management with greater productivity – jobs that are still required in a recession. Perhaps WDA can work in tandem with the private universities in Singapore to see how people might get better access to the finances needed obtain the qualifications required in the workforce today.

Skills retraining and upgrading is just another form of education. Could further and higher education be seen also as another form of skills upgrading? Perhaps WDA could collaborate with the private universities to provide Singaporeans access to quality tertiary education to keep them truly employable in the longer-term, recession or not.

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