Opening Remarks at Mediacorp Career Forward 2025

Senior Minister of State for Manpower Zaqy Mohamad, Suntec City Convention Centre

Ms Tham Loke Kheng, CEO, Mediacorp Distinguished Guests

1. Good morning. It gives me great pleasure to join you today.

2. We are currently in an era of unprecedented disruption. Globalisation, automation and AI are reshaping our economies and redefining our industries and jobs overnight. According to the World Economic Forum, more than half of the world’s workforce needs upskilling and reskilling by 2030.

3. Globally, workers face a daunting question: how do we stay relevant and find opportunities amidst uncertainties. Fortunately, our workers in Singapore are starting from a good position. In the past year, we enjoyed higher-than-expected economic growth and favourable labour conditions, despite coming out of COVID. Resident employment continued to grow, and median real income rose in 2024, reversing the decline in 2023.

4. It is important that we continue to future-proof ourselves to stay on top of these challenges and have the confidence to seize new opportunities. That’s why I’m heartened to see all of you here today, to gain industry insights, network and learn about reskilling and upskilling.

5. We want to empower you to take charge of your career health to build a bridge to your future – with resilience, adaptability and transformation. So allow me to explain how the Government can partner with you on this journey.

Taking charge of one’s Career Health

6. At the Ministry of Manpower’s Committee of Supply debate just yesterday, we spoke about Career Health SG, a nationwide initiative to empower workers to take charge and achieve their aspirations, and develop resilience, so that we can have fulfilling careers.

7. Similar to how we look after our own physical health with regular checkups, exercise and healthy eating, we must take charge of our careers more proactively. That’s something we often underestimate. It takes three simple steps:

i. First, regularly Assess our career prospects and skillsets. We should proactively identify our career opportunities and any skill gaps.
ii. Second, regularly review and Chart our career and training goals. We need to continuously adapt these goals based on market conditions and our stages in life.
iii. Finally, to take concrete actions and Execute plans to achieve our goals, be it a better job or improving our skills.

8. By taking these three steps to take charge of one’s career health – Assess, Chart, Execute (or ACE) - we can ace our careers with better jobs, better wages and greater resilience in a fast-changing job market.

9. To empower workers in this journey, we are supporting you with jobs and skills insights to help you make informed training and career decisions and longer-term career plans.

10. The CareersFinder feature on the MyCareersFuture portal is one way through which we are putting such information in the hands of workers. In the past when I was looking for a job we had to search online or look through newspapers. But today, we have the benefit of AI and many other tools. CareersFinder harnesses government data and AI to provide personalised guidance and recommendations for suitable jobs based on skills and experience, and training opportunities based on career goals. More than 55,000 individuals have used CareersFinder since its launch. We have seen encouraging signs of users broadening their job search horizons. Users have applied for jobs across a wider range of occupations – almost 40% more, after they used CareersFinder. Sometimes it’s not about job-matching or industry-matching, but having transferable skills you used in one sector to another sector, one job to another job.

11. We have also made quality in-person career guidance more accessible. We used to just think about guidance counsellors in school, but now we have counsellors for mid-careerists as well. We have piloted Polaris, a suite of personalised career programmes which provides career guidance for employed individuals looking to elevate their career through career planning. Under Polaris, these individuals can receive personalised career guidance from professionally certified career coaches. Since November 2023, Polaris has benefited more than 620 individuals. We have heard very positive feedback from participants – over 90% of participants who shared their feedback reported gaining clearer direction and higher confidence in planning their own careers.

12. Some of us may be concerned about the cost of career guidance service providers. We are pleased to share that we have extended the use of SkillsFuture Credits to all eligible career guidance services endorsed by Workforce Singapore (WSG). This means that you now have up to $1,000 to offset career guidance fees. For a start, you may tap on your credits to take up Polaris. We will continue to expand the list of endorsed providers, to help more workers access quality career guidance.

13. Let me share an example of someone who has upskilled herself and transitioned to a new, fulfilling role. Ms Nicole Chong, 26, is a Retail Manager at a pet food store which has a unique focus on sustainability, called The Dog Grocer. She has taken on a managerial role, overseeing merchandising, inventory and staff training. Managing a team in addition to operations was a new challenge for Nicole. Previously, she was a senior brand executive at an advertising agency. How did Nicole make this transition? She sought to upgrade herself by completing a Workforce Skills Qualifications Diploma in Retail Operations at the Singapore Institute of Retail Studies. Nicole made use of her SkillsFuture Credits to partly fund her studies, which supported her transformation journey to a fulfilling role.

14. As with Nicole, we hope that our programmes tailored to you will help you set your professional goals, in harmony with your strengths, values and aspirations.

Supporting Employers to Build Employees’ Career Health

15. Thriving careers are a result of intentional efforts by both employers and employees. Without employers to create the opportunities, there would be no careers but without the employees, there would be no business! Investing in career health is therefore a win-win for employers and workers. Research has shown that employers who do so can better attract and retain talent in a tight labour market. This sharpens their competitive edge and helps to grow their business.We will continue supporting employers to invest in their employees, and increase cross-deployability of their workforce to seize future opportunities amidst an increasingly tight labour market and fast-evolving industry needs. Last year, SNEF and MOM concluded the Alliance for Action (AfA) on Widening Access to Talent. Together with businesses and the Trade Associations and Chambers (TACs), the AfA developed recommendations for employers to enable skills-first hiring and workforce agility. A key recommendation was to build the capabilities of employers to guide their workers in developing their skills and careers. To put this into action, WSG has been piloting capability-building workshops for HR professionals and line managers to better equip them to engage their employees in meaningful career development conversations. To understand the type of skills you want your employees to develop, and how to harness their skills better as you recruit new employees. Another recommendation is to level up HR professionals’ capabilities to champion workforce transformation, from identifying critical and emerging skills, to charting plans to fill those gaps in their companies through hiring and workforce development. It’s not always about hiring new blood, but also harnessing skills you can develop within the organisation.

Upcoming initiatives

16. We will continue to press forward with efforts to better meet the needs of workers and employers. We look forward to sharing some of these new initiatives with you later this year. For example, we are working with a range of partners to advance the Career Health SG initiative. We recently announced a partnership with online job portal JobStreet, to use Government-verified jobs and skills data on their platform, to facilitate smoother job application and hiring. We hope to expand our partners to other online employment marketplaces soon. We are also looking at ways to provide customised data-driven insights to employers, just as we do for individuals with CareersFinder. Ultimately we want to match supply and demand, so that both sides can be better matched – people to jobs, employers to workers.

Conclusion

17. We hope that through building Career Health SG, we can realise the potential of Singapore’s most precious resource – our people.

18. Few countries have invested in such a holistic and integrated set of efforts to support career planning and workforce development. This underscores our continued commitment to empower Singaporeans to thrive amidst economic uncertainty.

19. These initiatives, no matter how well thought-out and structured, cannot succeed without everyone taking proactive action. Do not leave your career to chance. I encourage everyone here today to take charge of your career health to build a bridge to your future, and I can assure you that we will walk with you, alongside you, throughout the journey.

20. Thank you and I wish everyone a fulfilling time exploring your next career milestone at today’s Career Forward.