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Oral Answer by Mr Tan Chuan-Jin, Minister of State for National Development and Manpower, to Parliamentary Questions on Matching Jobs for Elderly Workers

Notice Paper no. 194 of 2012 for the Sitting on 10 July 2012
Question no. 456 for Oral Answer

MP: Ms Denise Phua Lay Peng

Question

To ask the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Manpower if he will consider setting up a central or decentralized Job Development, Assessment and Placement Service for Elderly Singaporeans for wider job options and proper job matching to commensurate with the job seekers' skills and physical abilities.

Answer

  1. The Government currently provides job assessment, matching and placement services through WDA’s Career Centres at the Community Development Councils (CDCs), the Employment and Employability Institute (e2i) and CaliberLink. These service centres are well-equipped, easily accessible and cater to the needs of a wide range of residents living across Singapore, including older workers.
  2. We recognise that older workers often have special requirements and needs. However, rather than a Job Development, Assessment and Placement Service for older workers only, we believe in adopting a functional approach and ensuring that our existing service touchpoints are sensitive to the needs and requirements of older workers too.
  3. We aim to attract and develop career consultants to have the right experience and personal qualities to assist a wide range of job seekers. The career consultants adopt a case management approach to help each client based on their individual needs. They carry out an in-depth assessment of each client’s capabilities and circumstances, before deciding how best to match job seekers to jobs or whether they need more training to become job ready.
  4. For older workers who are job ready, career consultants are careful during the job matching process to find a good job fit and ensure that job seekers are able to meet the demands of the jobs applied for. Career centres also actively source for a wide range of jobs across different industries that suit the capabilities and needs of older workers. For example, our career centres hold thematic job fairs targeted at older workers. These include North East Career Centre’s Silver Job Fair and South East Career Centre’s Evergreen Job Fair.
  5. At the same time, we recognise that some older job seekers may not be job-ready and require more training to update and upgrade their skills. Career consultants will work with such job seekers to identify their skills competencies and gaps, and recommend suitable training options for them to upgrade and get better jobs.
  6. While the Government will provide quality training and employment facilitation services for older workers, our efforts will have limited effect if conditions at the workplace are not conducive for older workers. Hence, we have and will continue to encourage employers to adopt age management practices in their workplaces, such as redesigning work processes to suit the physical abilities and skills of an ageing workforce. This will enable employers to be attractive to older workers in this tight labour market. We will also continue to encourage companies to adopt fair employment practices through the Tripartite Alliance on Fair Employment Practices (TAFEP). I would like to emphasise that given the tight labour market, companies should seriously look at hiring older workers, as they possess a lot of experience and are a stable part of the workforce whom we can tap on.
  7. Our concerted and dedicated efforts have helped a number of older workers into employment. Of the 14,200 job seekers placed by WDA’s Career Centres at the CDCs and the e2i in 2011, about 35% were individuals aged 50 and older. Nonetheless, we believe that more can be done for this group and we will continue to incorporate feedback and improve on our job matching and placement services for older workers.