Building Your Skills Passport: What Is This Feature In The MySkillsFuture Portal?

Skills Passport

Skills Passport is an online repository for qualifications you have acquired in the areas of skills, certificates, and licenses in Singapore. Launched in 2019, this feature can be found in the MySkillsFuture portal

For employers and job applicants, Skills Passport can be a seamless tool to navigate the job market because the platform allows for easy retrieval and sharing of the qualifications. Employers can also rest easy knowing that the authenticity of the qualifications is verified using blockchain technology.

For businesses to grow, it needs to acquire talent by assessing candidates in the job market. The prevailing ways of vetting candidates are through reviewing a candidate’s curriculum vitae (CV) or résumé, as well as conducting tests and interviews. One gap in this hiring process is that verifying the authenticity of paper qualifications within the candidate’s CV is not always convenient. 

Beyond getting candidates to bring their physical original copies, or calling the education institutions, some employers may opt to just trust the candidates. In cases of misplaced trust, this could lead to incidents of fraud. From time to time, the Manpower Ministry has reported cases of forged certifications. 

How Does Skills Passport Work?

For employees, each time they seek new employment, they will find themselves digging through dusty folders to find their old certificates from years ago. They can put this practice to rest with the widespread adoption of the Skills Passport. 

After logging into MySkillsFuture, individuals can populate their Skills Passport with basic information such as their social media profiles from LinkedIn and even Facebook, email address, and contact number.

Individuals would also be able to see that most of your local qualifications are available and verified within Skills Passport. These qualifications include the N, O and A Levels, and certificates from recognised higher tertiary education institutions (ie. polytechnics, LASALLE College of the Arts, Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, public universities, among others), as well as from the Singapore Workforce Skills Qualifications (WSQ). The words ‘SSG Verified’ are earmarked on these qualifications, with SSG standing for ‘SkillsFuture Singapore’.

For now, only certifications from 2019 are automatically shared. SkillsFuture has indicated that it will “further explore with the institutions on how OpenCerts can be extended to past graduates”.

MySkillsFuture uses OpenCerts, an open-source platform, to certify the documents (boxed): 

If some of your qualifications are not found on the platform (especially overseas qualifications), individuals can still manually update their Skills Passport by uploading their certificates within. These may not be earmarked with the “SSG Verified” tag.

Individuals can also add skills (such as technical proficiency or languages) and licences (such as vocational licences or driving licences).

When it comes to sharing the qualifications with potential employers, job candidates can do so through the “Share Skills Passport” option (arrowed): 

The function allows you to share specific, certifications, and licences. Once you’ve made the selections, you can then input the employer’s name and email address. Alternatively, prospective employees can also download the certificates on their Skills Passport as an OpenCerts file.

Read Also: Lost Your Job Because of COVID-19? Here’s What You Can Do

Verification Of Qualifications Through OpenCerts, Powered By Ethereum Blockchain

For the uninitiated, blockchain technology is a decentralised record keeping or ledger system. This means that a network of parties is involved in managing the recording process, and alterations of the ledger would need to go through all parties at the same time. A decentralised system, thus, mitigates incidents of hacking.

Blockchain technology is popularly known for powering cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. In the case of Skills Passport platform, the Ethereum ledger was applied to academic certification purposes. Singapore’s GovTech developed the OpenCerts platform, which allows local educational institutions to digitise certificates they have and will issue. These digital certificates were then published on the Ethereum blockchain, where it is assigned a digital signature that prevents tampering.

The Skills Passport platform uses this blockchain technology to verify users’ education certificates, so prospective employers can be sure what they are seeing are authentic qualifications. 

Business Cost Savings With OpenCerts & Skills Passport

With OpenCerts, the traditional physical checks of qualifications may become obsolete one day. Employers will no longer need to get local candidates to bring their original educational certificates or verified copies of their certificates (which will require candidates to return to their schools to retrieve if they have lost it or get the respective stamps if they haven’t verified their copies). 

Through Skills Passport, candidates have that one-stop function to certify and share the necessary qualifications with employers. If they send through the OpenCerts file, employers can verify the certificates on the OpenCerts platform . This spells savings in time and manpower costs for businesses, as human resources merely need to check against the platform for authenticity.

Read Also: 10 SkillsFuture Courses For Entrepreneurs

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