Goocal: Singapore’s labour market to tighten “dramatically”

Singapore’s labour market to tighten “dramatically”

Employers can expect Singapore’s local employment growth to slow dramatically in the next few years, dropping from the base of 95,000 last year to around 20,000 per annum in the last part of this decade.

With this in mind, the Minister for Manpower, Tan Chuan-Jin stressed on the need for a lean workforce, while leveraging on technology to improve productivity.

This also means that for upskilling initiatives like SkillFuture to be successful, employers, individuals, and training providers must all play their part, he said in a speech in Parliament.

Labour market composition

The tightening of the labour market, started by the government in 2010, has moderated the growth of foreign workforce from about 80,000 in 2011, to 26,000 last year.

“This is not because we have become manpower lean,” said the Minister.

Rather, companies have resorted to hiring more local workers instead of economising on manpower, leading to local employment growth of 95,000 in 2014, more than twice of the 38,000 in 2011.

While more jobs for locals is “a good thing”, Chuan-Jin warned companies that this high rate of local hiring will not last, due to the exit of Baby Boomers from the workforce.

02/03/2015 Mon 12:25 in Singapore by Akankasha Dewan

Favourable job prospects for Singapore’s graduates

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore have reported optimistic hiring activity for the next six months, especially for fresh university graduates and diploma holders, according to a latest survey by jobsDB.

The survey, which canvassed the opinions of over 300 SMEs in Singapore on their hiring plans and preferences, revealed that 70% of respondents are looking to employ new staff.

Only 10% have frozen headcount for the next six months, while 20% have no current hiring plans.

Job prospects were found to be especially favourable for new university graduates and diploma holders, with 66% and 75% of the SMEs surveyed looking to hire these candidates respectively.

In particular, SMEs are looking to fill positions in sales (40%), administration / office support (31%), accounting, engineering (19%) and IT (18%).

A majority (83%) of them are looking to hire junior executives, followed by entry level (58%), senior executives (40%), managers (24%) and lastly senior management (11%).

“The survey also uncovered that Gen X employees possessed more favourable work attitudes compared to Gen Y,” the report stated.

“SMEs gave Gen X a 12% higher rating for attendance, punctuality, willingness to work longer hours and work output quality, compared with their Gen Y counterparts.”

Interestingly, the top reasons given in the survey for not hiring included candidates being under-qualified or over-qualified for the position, poorly structured resumes and inappropriate social media behaviour.

Almost half of the respondents (48%) also expressed uncertainty towards hiring foreigners and only 24% said they were still open to it. Most popular reasons for hiring foreigners were a willingness to work longer hours, flexibility with compensation and salary, and highly trainable.

“What we are hearing from SMEs is that the struggle to hire local talent is real,” Sheldon Fernandez, managing director of jobsDB Singapore, said.

“However, it is heartening to see the government introduce initiatives such as SkillsFuture to invest in the development of local talent. This provides local businesses an avenue to access, train and retain locals to help meet the growing demands of their businesses.”

05/11/2015 Thu in SICC Member’s Room, Coping with a Manpower-Lean Economy

“If businesses do not become manpower-lean, if they do not become more productive, they will have great difficulties in finding enough manpower – be it local or foreign – to run their operations.”

One way to do this, he said, was to leverage technology, taking the example of how DBS Bank is using the supercomputer IBM Watson, to create tailored reports for its relationship managers, helping them gain hours daily.

Implementation of SkillsFuture

Pointing to the responsibility of employers in developing career pathways and fair remuneration scheme, Chuan-Jin said they have to shift away from a “plug and play” mindset to one which proactively develops every one of their workers.

“Today, many employers say that they cannot find Singaporeans with the right experience. But we all know no one is born with experience, it takes time and deliberate effort to develop this experience in our employees.”

He also addressed concerns that some employers may cut costs by asking their workers to co-fund the cost of their training using their SkillsFuture Credit.

“Let me be very clear that the credits are meant to support training initiated by individuals, not to fund training which employers send them for,” he said.

Source :
http://www.hunmaresourcesonline.net/singapores-labour-market-tighten/
http://www.humanresourcesonline.net/favourable-job-prospects-singapore-graduates/
http://www.sicc.com.sg/SICC/

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