Grab a seat and prepare yourself for a ride into the future of rail transport in Singapore. In over a decade or so, eight in 10 households will have an easy 10-minute saunter to a train station and there will be three new rail lines comprising Thomson-East Coast, Jurong Region, and Cross Island.
Today, we commute over a railway network of 230km, and it will only be a matter of time before this expands to an overall length of 360km when 2030 rolls around.
The Land Transport Authority (LTA) said that the “expansion will be taking place even as we upgrade ageing rail assets across existing lines to sustain rail reliability, and adopt new operations and maintenance technologies such as remote condition sensors and augmented reality to achieve greater cost efficiencies.”
Obviously, this will come at a cost, but with positive outcomes for all in Singapore, including rail workers. LTA is committing to invest $100 million into a new initiative called the Rail Manpower Development Package (RMPD).
LTA co-developed the five-year RMPD initiative for rail workers with the National Transport Workers’ Union (NTWU) and public transport operators (PTOs).
The announcement on the RMDP was made by Coordinating Minister for Infrastructure and Minister for Transport Mr Khaw Boon Wan at the Public Transport Workers’ Appreciation Day 2019 held on 9 November at Toa Payoh Hub Atrium.
Addressing the audience at the event, he said: “A growing rail network must be supported by a growing workforce. Concurrently, your jobs will also become more complex. You will have to deal with new technologies (such as digital signalling, condition monitoring devices and data analytics) and work with new tools like augmented reality, smart glasses, and tablets.”
NTWU provided valuable inputs towards the RMPD development and will be part of the steering and working committees that will guide and drive its implementation.
“Through the respective CTCs [company training committees] and the Land Transport Industry Transformation Committee co-chaired by LTA and NTWU, we look forward to working closely with our tripartite partners to develop relevant training programmes and skills roadmaps for all our rail workers across the different vocations. We hope that these efforts will ensure that our rail workforce remains one of the most professional in the industry regionally and beyond,” said NTUC Assistant Secretary-General and NTWU Executive Secretary Melvin Yong in his Facebook post.
He added that the union will also be looking at helping experienced workers who do not have formal recognition of skillsets receive industry-recognised certification.
According to LTA, there will be three key components to the RMDP. These are manpower development incentives; new SGRail industry scholarships and in-service sponsorship (for workers who wish to deepen their engineering expertise); and co-investments in training hardware equipment.
The manpower development incentive will benefit 3000 more rail workers who will undergo training in new skills areas such as data analytics, robotics and automation applications and internet of applications, among others. The knowledge gained will help them to do new jobs and support the increasingly complex rail network.
LTA also added that half of the RMDP will be spent on training the existing workforce, with the remaining split between scholarships and in-service sponsorship, and co-investments in training hardware.
The RMDP will complement existing schemes under SkillsFuture Singapore and Workforce Singapore, which ensure supported courses are affordable and cater to wider needs across companies.
