Maximising the SkillsFuture impact

SMU and SkillsFuture Singapore collaborate to address the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of delivering quality adult education. 

By Alvin Lee

SMU Office of Research – In 2015, the Singapore government launched the SkillsFuture movement, a “national movement to provide Singaporeans with the opportunities to develop their fullest potential throughout life, regardless of their starting points.” 

As most Singaporeans understand it, the government provides SkillsFuture Credit that citizens can draw on to offset course fees for SkillsFuture-approved training courses to improve on current skills or learn new skills to adapt to evolving professional demands.

Its implementation is driven by the Ministry of Education statutory board SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG), whose mission and vision can be condensed to “skills mastery”, “lifelong learning”, and enabling “fulfilling careers”. It publishes an annual report called the Skills Demand for the Future Economy that delves into topics such as “[c]hanges in skills compositions of jobs required by the Singapore economy” and “[r]esources to support citizens embarking on a skills development journey”. 

As such, adult education and Continuing Education and Training (CET) make up a major part of SSG’s focus. Unlike undergraduate education, the diversity in expertise and background among adult learners, pose unique challenges in delivering effective training and tailored strategies and support are required to maximise the learning outcomes.

“Not all training providers may be able to screen all candidates to have the best experience within training, so you could have multiple profiles within the session which then may lead to a challenging learning environment for some. If we can address that gap, that would increase the productivity of both the teaching and learning sides,” observes Jessica Methodius, Director of the Manpower & Infrastructure Planning Division (MIPD) at SSG.

She said this at a recent SMU Multi-Disciplinary and Knowledge Exchange Research (MAKER-X) engagement organised by the Office of Research, where leaders at SSG and its sister statutory board Workforce Singapore (WSG) explored ways to address obstacles in delivering effective training. SMU faculty present at the engagement, such as Professor of Computer Science Pradeep Varakantham, highlighted the usefulness of “knowing what the abilities of different people are so that instructors can appropriately tailor the courses.” 

Learning about the learners

Grouping learners by their abilities and background inevitably draws observations of bias, both for and against. That is further compounded by a learner’s motivation for signing up, especially when viewed through SSG’s mission and vision of facilitating “lifelong learning” and “fulfilling careers”.

“Unlike professionals and undergrad students who are going for a good job and career, a part of those CET learners sign up for different reasons,” points out Kevin Lee, Director of SSG’s Strategic Planning Division (SPD). “Some of them sign up to improve their chances to get a good career, but others sign up with less clear motivation, 

“The Singapore government invests extensively on SkillsFuture [initiatives]. Are we doing this only to achieve a good employment outcome? Or is this about lifelong learning? So, I would like to screen for motivation but I understand it is quite hard.”

Citing the development of the Careers & Skills Passport, which is “a personal digital career and training repository comprising a record of your Skills, Employment, Academic Qualifications and Professional Certifications,” Lee explains that SSG is working to optimise the effectiveness of the approximate S$415 million that the government had set aside for SkillsFuture in FY2024. 

Used in conjunction with a pre-course survey, this passport could help to answer the motivation question.

“At the start of the course, training providers could assess motivation by studying the profile of their learners via the future Careers & Skills Passport feature. A pre-course survey could provide further insights on whether learners in the class are taking the course to improve career prospects,” notes Chua Minyi, Director of Strategic Planning Division (SPD) at WSG. 

“Let’s say 70 percent of the class who have adjacent skills are hoping to get into better jobs. You could then tilt the learning outcomes to tailor the course towards the 70 percent. You could connect the skills learned to new career opportunities, highlight industry examples of skills application or professional networking opportunities, as appropriate.”

Tr(AI)ning trainers? 

The flip side to that are the training providers, whose quality and impact are recorded by SSG in two Training Quality and Outcomes Measurement (TRAQOM) surveys. The related area of classroom teaching efficacy is a research interest area of both Professor of Computer Science Pradeep Varakantham and Associate Professor of Information Systems Swapna Gottipatti, whose current research project is an AI-enabled video analytics software that could “understand the gaps of the teaching aspects [such as the teacher] trying to only engage the right side or left side of the classroom, or not ready to take the answers, or not having long discussions with the students, and so on.”

For Tan Han Yao, Deputy Director of SSG’s Quality Management Division (QMD), such research helps to achieve the division’s goals of managing course quality which includes the trainer’s credentials and performance. He sees such research has the potential to complement learners’ feedback through TRAQOM surveys and together help better answer the question: “Are there other things that we can perform to inform us of the quality besides going through the kind of typical accreditation process?”

This tied in with the other theme of the engagement: The impact of digitalisation and technology on future skills requirements and skills integration. “Beyond identifying content, how do we teach it better? How do we adapt the teaching, both in content and cadence, to the specific context of an individual? Is the person now able to do more integrated thinking and expand beyond skills acquisition” explains SMU Professor of Computer Science Archan Misra, who is also the Vice Provost of Research.

For Siau Keng Leng, Lee Kong Chian Professor of Information Systems, meta learning, or learning to learn, is important.

“We have to train students to learn how to learn in the face of rapidly changing technology,” says Professor Siau. “They need to be mindful of ‘How am I learning? Are there issues with my learning approach? How am I going to enhance my learning process?’ These are the skills that we may have introduce to workers. 

“Also, the other thing would be, ‘How do we integrate soft skills such as leadership and empathy into the curriculum?’ You're not going to compete with computers on counting or computing faster. AI and robots excel in hard skills and they will keep improving. 

“So, where does a human come in? Maybe the soft skills side. These are the skills that we have to train our workers to be competent in. Also, how can we train workers to use and complement AI and collaborate with robots?” 

Moving forward, SSG will collaborate with SMU on research in CET and the impact of technology on learning to deepen insights into effective lifelong learning and skills mastery.

Back to Research@SMU February 2025 Issue