By Ramesh Subbaraman and Ryan Kieran Chan
Channel 5 “Talking Point” (5 May)
Helping PMEs
Stepping up efforts to encourage Professionals, Managers and Executives or PMEs to upgrade themselves when they still have jobs will be a focus area for new Manpower Minister Lim Swee Say.
Calling this “futurise” through lifelong learning, Mr Lim shared on how the tripartite partners are worki together to help PMEs who face challenges in a restructuring economy.
“One is how can we help our PMEs to have fair treatment at the workplace, whether it is promotion, whether it is appointment even retrenchment, to make sure that the PMEs are treated fairly.
“The second area which we think a lot more can be done is in professional upgrading -How can we help our PMEs of today to deep skill, to do the job of today better, and at the same time horizontal skill them so that if they need to cross to another sector, they have the basic quality to move on,” he explained.
Earn and Learn
In the area of skills upgrading, Mr Lim explained the role that SkillsFuture will play in the years ahead and focused on the Earn and Learn programme.
Earn and Learn is a work-study programme for fresh graduates from polytechnics and the Institute of Technical Education (ITE) that is designed to better support their transition into the workforce.
“Under the Earn and Learn programme, we are bringing in new job entrants together with the industry and together with it, providing the incentives so that hopefully, more companies would be more receptive to take in new graduates and hopefully new graduates would be more receptive to starting working and learning at the same time.
“At the end of the day, we would like to create different paths. For those who want to pursue degrees, go ahead. For those who prefer to start working, acquire some working experience before they go back to school, go ahead ,” he explained.
Mr Lim emphasised that any economy, workforce or country has more to gain if it is able to embrace the future ahead of the competition.
Channel 8 Hello Singapore (6 May)
Uplifting LWWs
Mr Lim spoke about the importance of helping Low-Wage Workers (LWWs) to progress, and cited the Progressive Wage Model (PWM) as an example of one of the ways the Labour Movement is helping.
“PWM will not just increase wages for LWWs, but also allow them to upgrade themselves. After fighting for PWM to be implemented, I am very happy to say that we (the Labour Movement) managed to reach the goal of making it mandatory (for the security and landscape sectors) next year,” he said.
He also went on to explain how the Devan Nair Employment and Employability Institute (e2i) can help these workers.
“The idea behind e2i is to help LWW on two fronts. Many LWWs do not have good enough jobs, so we need to make their jobs better; many LWWs are not highly skilled, so we have to upskill them. We need to move on both fronts so as to achieve better skills and better jobs, such that both progress in tandem,” said Mr Lim.
Source: NTUC This Week
