Category Archives: Careers

Skills and degrees

There’s been recurring opinions, stories and new reports about jobs and skills in Singapore over the past couple of months. The Job Skills insights report presented some interesting results that can be interpreted in vastly different ways, and is perhaps worth our society deliberating over.

One of the statistic in the report (page 14) that comes across as strange though not surprising, is that a non-degree holder with high skills proficiency is finding it HARDER (lower chance of getting the job) to get high-skilled jobs while a degree holder with medium to low skills proficiency can access high-skilled jobs more EASILY (higher chance of getting the job).

And on the next page, it claims that those same degree holders who were mid-low in skill proficiency had higher remuneration, and more autonomy in the jobs they got. Overall, the slant of the report seems to be promoting the need to obtain degrees and more qualifications even though it is supposed to highlight the importance of skills.

There are different opinions about what exactly is happening in Singapore. Some believe that if there simply aren’t job opportunities around, the paper chase just ends up being an arms race where jobs are just moving around from one group to another. The winner then becomes the certificate issuing organisations and schools.

Others think that there’s something absurd about hiring process and HR if they are so reliant on the degree or paper qualifications rather than real skills. Perhaps the high density market and having no short of manpower options mean that such patterns emerge where paper ‘evidence’ is used more than trying to screen for real skills. That contributes to some kind of ‘efficiency’ in the process especially when the HR function in Singapore isn’t exactly the most progressive.

There are others who believe the government’s emphasis on skills had just become a matter of incentivising more paper mills because it is easier to have a clear-cut measure of the output of their ‘skills’ policy. This is why instead of having skillsfuture churn out people who have the skills for the future (such as AI-literacy, programming skills, ability to think more strategically, understanding of carbon emissions, understanding of new energy technologies or what sustainability is really about), we simply get more aunties who could bake melon pan, or uncles who could generate good morning messages with GenAI.

I exaggerate.

But the point remains that we have a culture that is steeped in wanting to have tangible proofs of something that is genuinely intangible. And degrees or paper qualification remains a proxy for us to somehow observe skills. The point of it all is really the skills rather than the degree – so to make it about the degree seems rather superficial and short term. If anything, the big companies hiring in Singapore could come to the conclusion that since the degree holders they’re hiring have already hit the mid-low level of skills proficiency, the talent pool is really shallow and this is it, and they forgo hiring the non-degree holders who have high skill proficiencies.

Maybe that is when they start pulling out of the market. Because they are not able to access the real talent pool they need.

In long run, our paper chase actually ends up stopping ourselves.

Green jobs

While in the meeting rooms of policymakers, the discussion around green economy and creation of ‘green jobs’ is underway, there is a slightly different conversation about green jobs in the coffee shops and cafes.

“Good work-life balance. But limited impact.”

“We move two steps forward and three steps back sometimes when trying to drive corporate green transition.”

“We have no veto power on investment decisions, the company still needs to make money so the frontline business units have the final say even when the investment have adverse environmental impacts.”

“The corporate sustainability department primarily manages reputational risks, not environmental ones.”

The best way to create impactful green jobs is perhaps when the laws and regulations properly require compliance with stricter environmental standards. At the moment, a lot of compliance are around reporting requirements and yes you do get some kind of ‘green jobs’ but they are mainly the bean-counter sort. The solution-seeking sort will come when you begin to set up standards in environmental performance that companies have to meet.

There is no point propagating green jobs, trying to subsidise manpower for these jobs and using tax credits or other incentives to force companies to locate their sustainability or green functions in Singapore when there is no corresponding increase in environmental performance standards imposed on our corporates.

Better to spend the resources studying the suitable regulations to put in place. And then you can support the companies to meet them.

Fast followers

Being a fast follower is a good strategy; it allows you to take in the lessons from those who have tried and failed first. It is even a strategy that enables you to become a leader from public’s eyes.

But the challenge for the fast follower who gained leadership status is falling into the trap of thinking they are the leader. Their skills in curating what they learnt from the mavericks, scaling what was small and bringing things to market fast, are not going to be suited for what is required to take real leadership: influencing the market, uncovering innovation from their own values and principles.

They may have to pivot at some point when they’ve outcompeted all those whom they were fast-following.

Learning to struggle

If there’s one big thing we need in society that the education system is not properly teaching us, that is the need to struggle. There’s this sentiment in the education system that struggling suggests something is wrong, that is a state to transit away from, and to be avoided if possible. But what if struggling through difficulties, challenges is actually an important aspect of life? What if it takes struggling in order to truly learn something? Not just to acquire head knowledge but also to have a practical sense of how to use that knowledge?

How do we teach people to be resilient otherwise? How do we cultivate a generation of people who can actually deal with those problematic issues confronting mankind (eg. climate change, sharp inequalities, cracks in market capitalism, etc)?

Human resources and sustainability

The world is getting impatient. For results, for success. And corporate training for employees have become shorter; often so short it is non-existent. People and companies are pressing for results and when they do spend, they want the results immediately. And the quality of HR suffers; they are just trying to sift the market and find the talents to hire. Those with experience but are not capable will no longer be able to find work when they are planning to switch. That’s if they are not made redundant yet.

The ones who are inexperienced may find themselves somewhat discriminated against. But if they prove themselves to be capable, they’ll be able to move pretty fast in the private sector. The market will reward them richly; but rarely would companies incentivise them to help train up more people to be like them. Companies would just want to get them for their performance. And drive their results with better rewards and compensation.

Is this sustainable? I’m not sure. I personally don’t think it is going to work. Because the ones who are capable would rise and then eventually grow bigger than the organisations themselves. Or if they are actually keen on upskilling and developing people, they might move out and start businesses themselves because existing businesses out there are not really rewarding employees for developing others and fostering better work environments. Why so? Because collective results are hard to properly attribute to these champions. It is easier to attribute individual results; or allocate achievements to specific individuals.

Scientific management is showing its cracks. I’m not sure how long it will take to manifest in company valuations and the reputation of companies.

Structuring incentives for waste

As we try to navigate the climate transition, we are working within a framework of incentives and economic structure where incentives are sometimes mis-aligned to driving climate-positive behaviours. Not just climate but sustainability overall. Waste management represents one of the more problematic area. In many situations, the cost of waste management is pretty much socialised with the cost spread out across a large number of people while the economic benefits accrued by only some. Take electronic waste without proper framework in place for disposal and attribution of responsibility to producers, the society bears the overall cost of managing these difficult waste while the benefits are borne only by the users (especially those who are replacing devices extremely often, and the producers who are selling electronic products.

By incorporating producer responsibility, the cost of disposal and waste management should preferably be priced upfront to customers so that they are paying for the lifecycle cost.

The same should be done for various product packaging. After all, the producers are typically the ones responsible for handling the packaging in the first place so it won’t be too bad for them to take on the responsibility. They can then put the cost into the price tag of the users, who would then be the ones paying for those goods that require the particular packaging. The thing about packaging materials and electronic waste is that they have value as recycled materials anyways – which means that if the ‘disposal’ logistics cost can be at least in part offset through the value recovered from aggregation of these materials, it is a win-win.

What about food waste? Food waste should not be the responsibility of the producers since it is the consumers who determine the level of waste based on how much they purchase and eventually consume. Likewise, those in-between the value chain from farm to table would also be responsible for some of the food waste through their utilisation of the ingredients. The way to make them responsible for the disposal cost is to allow only specific channels of disposing food waste and pricing it properly. The cost of disposing food waste will necessarily be the logistics involved, and then offset against whatever residual value the food waste can generate. What kind of residual value is there? After all, food waste cannot be used to remanufactured food (unlike cardboard whose fibre can be used for recycled paper, or e-waste where the extracted metals can be turned back into materials to produce new products).

Food waste can be turned into energy through anaerobic digestion. And the process will generate methane that can be used as a fuel. The fuel potentially displaces fossil fuel and emits biogenic carbon dioxide in the short carbon cycle. Of course, there are plenty of other biofuels that can also be produced from food waste. If we start putting a value on the food waste, does it mean more of such waste would be produced? It is quite unlikely since the value will probably represent some kind of residual value from the primary use of the food. Yet we find CEO of multi-national company Lufthansa thinking otherwise.

The challenge we have today is that the incentives around recovery of residual value from waste. We will need to redesign how we are able to extract residual value, offset against the disposal costs. We will also need to ensure disposal costs are properly priced and applied to the right parties responsible for the waste generation. We need to set up incentives such that waste is properly sorted and pushed into various streams. The cost of mixed-stream convenience needs to be costed to reflect the cost of sorting.

There’s a lot of work ahead. We need people to get on to them.

Temptation to be an expert

For most of my life, I had wanted to be an expert. I wanted to be looked up upon for specific knowledge or intelligence, or smarts in some area. There were of course, some areas I was more keen on than others. And as I read more, and gravitate towards specific topics, I wanted more and more to be known as an expert in those subject matters. The problem is that I was curious about many other things as well; in things I would not consider myself expert in (yet).

So then my knowledge starts to broaden, and I get to know a lot more about a variety of things. And I begin to see patterns across the domains. And I begin to think of expertise less like a deep hole, and more like a network of connections across disparate bits of knowledge that others might not recognise as fitting together but you, as the expert, can see it. Precisely because of the lots of learning you had to get there – not by hoarding knowledge but by eventually seeing patterns in the knowledge you acquire.

And then you begin to belittle dense knowledge in any single field or narrow buckets of knowledge that serve specific and narrow purposes. You no longer think that an expert is worth becoming; if you were an expert in just one or a few areas, you are losing out so much more of reality worth exploring. Maybe I just need to be reminded that I never was keen on being an expert, just pursuing wisdom more than mere knowledge. And wisdom is truly a more worthwhile pursuit.

Among us

There are imposters around us; they pretend to be doing their work but are actually creating problems for their coworkers to solve. They are starting fires around workplaces that we all have to put out. The only issue is that companies are trying to get people to practise teamwork and they are not trying to sniff out imposters who are just pretending to be teammates. Unless you start playing office politics and all that.

What this means is that if you have been doing well, and keep doing well even though you didn’t seem to have previous experience or built any credentials around it, you’ve already proven yourself. What this means is that if you have some suspicion about yourself as an imposter, consider your intentions rather than your qualifications. What makes you an imposter is when you have drastically different intentions from the rest of the team.

It’s not just your qualifications that gets you there. It’s your intentions as well.

Meetings and processes

As organisations grow, there’s inevitably a lot of time caught up in meetings and processes to keep people informed, to synchronise and align things. During my time in government I probably spend more than 40% of my week in large team meetings that quickly consume 5-8 man-hours just trying to coordinate activities or update bosses.

I experience that process of bloating as I journey with growing organisations I’ve been with. And I often feel helpless about it. It seemed to me as though the bureaucracy inevitably comes no matter how much we are able to delay it. Technology tools can help to a certain extent but it also creates the convenience and reduce the excuse of coordinating more frequently.

In my perspective, there is this continued struggle between coordination, management and actually getting things done. The bigger and more complex a project is, the more time and resources gets devoted to such work. The question is, what are big projects and such grand scale for? Why do we always focus on scale economies without recognising the downside it has on productivity of our people? Is scale really to capture economies or to feed egos.

Perspectives on salary

What do you view your salary as? Is that a measure of your earning power? Or the return on your education and preparation? The cashflow returns on the asset of your human capital (there’s further capital accumulation through learning on the job). Is it always about trying to increase this return? Or is there anything about getting more days of leave each year? And more benefits?

And do you think you can ask for more? Who is in the market for your labour? And who are you competing? If you consider that your employer is merely paying an ongoing subscription on your full time services as an employee, would that help you think about how much you’re going to ask for?

Why does it seem that the work you do to earn that salary also matters a lot? What actually drives that perception? If you earn $6000-$8000 a month as a construction worker, would you take it up? Assuming you’d be trained from scratch. What kind of work gives you the sense of balance between your salary and the output being produced? How are they shaped by your own thoughts and the people around you?

Many questions and it takes a lot of adulting to answer them. Some of us might never even come to arrive at the answers despite a lifetime of work.