In Singapore, businesses and government agencies team up to tackle the talent gap

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Global tech firms tap government-supported talent development initiatives

As global tech companies come to Singapore to build their Asia-Pacific presence — and as Singaporean startups compete for market share — they need talent to carry out their vision. Singapore, like many countries, is working to shore up its IT talent pool to meet demand, while looking at strategies for closing the gap between open jobs and the available talent pool. And the stakes are high. According to consulting firm Korn Ferry’s recent Global Talent Crunch report on Singapore, a talent shortfall could lead to a $2.74 billion economic impact in the technology and telecommunications sector by 2030.

One solution that Singapore visionaries are already tackling is to address talent concerns from within.

“Importing talent is not sustainable and should only be a small part of Singapore’s response to the talent crunch,” Dilal Ranasinghe, head of search and client development ASEAN at Korn Ferry Futurestep, says in the Global Talent Crunch report. “At a country level, we need to focus on our current workforce and look at how we can upgrade and reskill the population quickly and efficiently.”

Many of Singapore’s colleges and universities have programs to train workers in emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain — and, in some cases, are partnering with technology businesses to do so. For example, the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the IBM Center for Blockchain Innovation have jointly developed a blockchain training program for students of the university’s School of Computing. Students will learn about the basics of blockchain technology and how to apply it to functions such as supply chain management. The NUS’s Institute of Systems Science also offers StackUp, a new program designed to give students foundational skills for launching products and taking them to market.

Accelerating Talent Development

Singapore’s university training programs play a key role in strengthening the technology talent pool. But it takes time for graduates to complete their education and enter the job market. To complement pre-employment training, government and private initiatives help narrow the talent gap in innovative ways, including apprenticeships and immersion programs. With shorter and more intensive learning cycles, skilled technology workers can bring their talents to market faster. In addition, smaller companies that find it difficult to compete for talent against multinational businesses with deep pockets can create their own pipelines of job candidates.

In many cases, apprenticeships and training programs can supply training that may be missing from the CVs of recent graduates. That’s the philosophy behind the ThoughtWorks Immersion Programme, developed by software design company ThoughtWorks for its Singapore operations. The 12-month curriculum, launched in January 2018 and supported by the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), provides intensive, hands-on training in agile software development.

Wen Shun Wong, head of operations and finance for ThoughtWorks in Southeast Asia, sees the program as a way for the company to grow its own talent.

“The talent pool in Singapore is still maturing,” says Wong, who attributes the changes, at least in part, to the national education’s shift from a standard instructional learning and memorization model to one that encourages students to be innovative and creative. But he says there is still lingering cultural pressure for graduates to become managers, rather than hands-on technologists.

“We realized we couldn’t find a lot of people with hands-on experience in coding,” Wong says. “So we decided, why not train them ourselves and help to build the next generation of coders?”

The program initially provided five people with about three months of classroom training in software development, and about nine months working with experienced ThoughtWorks employees on real-world projects. The company hopes to attract people who might have difficulty gaining the attention of recruiters, such as mid-career switchers and women. All participants will be full employees, not trainees or interns. Seven more participants started the program in Sep 2018, bringing the total to 12 as of late 2018.

The hope is that at the end of participants’ stints, they will have strong ties to ThoughtWorks and continue with the company. “There’s no formal commitment requiring them to stay,” Wong says. “But we hope they’ll decide that if they are learning and growing, they’ll believe this is the right place to start their careers as coders.” The first round of participants have worked with ThoughtWorks employees on health monitoring applications and a citizen-focused mobile app.

Accenture has taken a similar approach in Singapore with its Emerging Technologists Development Program. New polytechnic graduates can apply to work at Accenture in entry-level positions while getting training in new skills, such as cloud computing and data analytics.

A Focus on Emerging Skills like AI

IT companies in Singapore increasingly desire AI skills. Some companies can afford to pay top dollar for AI experts, leaving other companies to wait for graduates to finish school – potentially delaying their AI initiatives until they can find skilled workers to hire. To even out the playing field for up-and-coming technology companies, AI Singapore, a government-funded program that aims to advance AI research, created an apprenticeship to technologists fine-tune their AI skills.

The nine-month apprentice program, which launched in May 2018, accepted 13 people who have a basic grounding in machine learning or software development. The program will provide two months of AI-related coursework, followed by seven months of on-the-job training on a real AI project. A second batch of apprentices will begin their studies in November 2018.

The companies accepting AI Singapore apprentices range from early-stage startups to established, medium-sized businesses with an emerging need for employees with AI skills. Apprentices are paid a stipend by AI Singapore, which also covers the fees for the coursework.

“The program is planned very deliberately as a way to help someone very new to AI build an AI project end to end,” explains Laurence Liew, director of AI industry innovation for AI Singapore. The projects where AI Singapore apprentices are placed focus on designing and building data pipelines and data warehouses for AI projects, or building and deploying machine-learning applications.

Similar to ThoughtWorks’ Immersion Programme, the hope is that the apprentices will build relationships with their organizations and become regular employees. “Within those nine months, hopefully the company will make an impression on them,” Liew says. “The company might not be able to pay someone the same salaries as Google. But this way, our local companies get the chance to hire local talent.”

“We need to invest in building our own capabilities here in Singapore,” Liew says. To grow the technology sector, it’s sometimes necessary to import talent – but the long-term strategy is to strengthen the skills of homegrown workers.

“Our goal is to train 200 apprentices in the next several years,” Liew says. “Two hundred people won’t make a significant impact on Singapore’s AI talent. But it can help companies bootstrap their own AI teams.” In other words, by adding an apprentice to a team in order to complete an AI project, a company can gain more customers for its AI products, and then attract skilled AI talent from outside the business.

AI training is also the basis for a new program created by EDB and U.S.-based gaming technology firm Nvidia. The EDB-NVIDIA Future Talents Program, which was launched in October 2017, offers 30 postgraduate scholarships to citizens or permanent residents of Singapore to study neural networks, machine learning and architecture development for graphics processing units (GPUs). Together with local universities, Nvidia engineers will mentor the Master’s and Ph.D. students to develop AI skills that address industry specific needs.

“Electronics enables the adoption of AI in applications such as autonomous vehicles, advanced manufacturing, and fintech,” said Mr. Chng Kai Fong, Managing Director, Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB). “Singapore’s strong electronics ecosystem brings us closer to our vision to be a Smart Nation. The EDB-NVIDIA Future Talents Program will help us to build the next generation of AI talent in Singapore, and strengthen our position as a hub for AI development and adoption.”

Companies in Singapore are also realizing the value of creating talent programs that map back to highly specific skills that their businesses need. In 2015, IBM and Temasek Polytechnic teamed up to open the TP-IBM Security Operations Centre, which offers courses on combating cybercrime. In a similar vein, Google partnered with Singapore’s Info-communications Media Development Authority (IMDA) to create the Squared Data & Analytics program, which trains young professionals for data and analytics jobs, particularly those in the media advertising fields.

A Sustainable Solution to Foster Talent

Whether backed by the government or supported by private businesses, IT training programs in Singapore often occupy the middle ground of training between years-long university programs and quick workshops. The training programs are essential for turning out skilled technology talent in a way that keeps up with advances in emerging technology.

“Bootcamp training only works if someone already has advanced knowledge of a field,” says AI Singapore’s Liew. “It’s very hard to learn data science in a few weeks – it takes time.” In an immersion or apprentice program where participants “get their hands dirty” on a real project, the training can be quickly updated as needed. “If someone publishes a new AI paper this week, we can ask an apprentice to apply that technology to their training and their project next week,” he says.

The people behind some of Singapore’s efforts to accelerate IT skills development are hoping to “grow their own timber,” to borrow AI Singapore’s apprentice program slogan, and hope that other organizations will follow their lead. Says Liew, “Hopefully we are creating a training model that can scale.”

The alternative, ThoughtWorks’ Wong says, is to keep offering higher and higher salaries to fewer skilled technologists – an approach that’s not sustainable.

“More companies should offer programs like this,” says ThoughtWorks’ Wong about the firm’s immersion program. “It’s an important part of growing and retaining talent. And it’s better than trying to hire from the same small pool of people.”

The information in this article was accurate as of 27 March 2019, when it was first published on this website.