Over 17,000 jobseekers have reaped the benefits of Singaporean government career placement scheme in the first half of 2018, indicating a significant increase of 40 percent from the same period last year. From this number, about two-thirds had been unemployed, half were professionals, managers, executives and technicians (PMETs), and a third were aged 50 and above.
According to Manpower Minister Josephine Teo, the increasing job placement this year can be attributed to the presence of more progressive employers, who do not expect their employees to be 100 percent job fit. Instead, these employers seek for potential talents who can be trained on the job. She added that the government is committed in helping such firms with training and even salary costs.
Speaking after a career preview fair for a nursing professional conversion programme at Nanyang Polytechnic on Saturday (Sept 15), Mrs Teo said that while there is a certain amount of churn in the labour market, job opportunities are still available even for those who are not quite so young to get back to the workforce. This is one of the schemes under Workforce Singapore’s Adapt and Grow initiative launched in 2016 that aimed to guide and match Singaporeans to opportunities for good careers, Straits Times reports.
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Mrs Teo also said that jobseekers need to be open to job offers that might not be familiar to them as well. While it is not easy to make the transition into new job functions or new industries, she said, a willingness to consider such options would make returning to the workforce easier.
Her comments come on the back of the labour market report on the first half of the year released on Thursday (Sept 13). In the second quarter, layoffs increased to 3,030 from 2,320 in the first, but the second-quarter figure was lower than that of the same period a year ago. The bulk of layoffs came from the services sector, with PMETs comprising 79 percent of all retrenched residents.
Mrs Teo said it was not surprising that PMETs would take up a bigger proportion of retrenchments given that the number of PMET jobs has been growing faster than non-PMET ones. Most of the retrenchments were due to business restructuring and reorganising, and not recessionary measures, she added.
“That tells us jobs are still available… However, it does require that some adjustments are made.”
