On 17 December, the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) released the 16th edition of its Jobs Situation Report – its final one for 2020. It provided a round-up of its efforts to curate jobs skills opportunities under the SGUnited Jobs and Skills Package.
Here are 5 things that were reported in the press release.
#1 123,000 Opportunities Created – Surpassing Initial Goal Of 100,000
When the SGUnited Jobs & Skills Package was first announced, there was an initial target to create 100,000 openings. This target was crossed by August 2020, and by October 2020 more than 123,000 openings had been created. By today, this number should be even higher.
As we can see in the chart, 3 in 4 opportunities created were for jobs opening. Of this, it is encouraging to see that a large majority were for long-term jobs.
Overall, opportunities for PMET roles constituted 88,940 openings as well.
#2 60,000 Jobseekers Placed Into Opportunities
From April to October, 60,000 jobseekers were already placed into opportunities. This is positive, given that statistics from MOM’s Labour Force in Singapore Advance Release 2020 indicated that employment levels in Singapore were at the lowest rate since 2014.
As we can see in the chart above, more than 80% of placed opportunities were into jobs. This is reflective of the proportion of opportunities on offer as well.
While there were many more PMET opportunities on offer, the opportunities that were placed skewed towards non-PMET roles. Mature workers took up 50% of the job placements and 35% of the company-hosted traineeships and attachments and training opportunities.
In total, less than 50% of the opportunities on offer (123,000) were filled (60,000) as at October 2020.
#3 5 Sectors With Most Placements: InfoComm; Healthcare; Manufacturing; Professional Services; And Financial Services
In total, the top 5 sectors will most placements filled 19,200 positions, or roughly a third of the placed opportunities.
The Information & Communications sector and Healthcare sector have placed the most opportunities. Logically, these are also the sectors that the government should focus more efforts on – with the rise of digitalisation and healthcare both hallmarks of the current pandemic.
However, the top 5 sectors that have placed opportunities VS the top 5 sectors with open opportunities are slightly different. Interestingly, in the chart below, we can see the food services sector actually had the second highest open opportunities but did not fill enough positions to make it into the top 5 sectors that filled opportunities.
#4 Focus Still On Matching Jobseekers Into Positions
Understandably, effort is being focused into the Healthcare and Information & Communications sectors, with multi-pronged strategies to place more locals.
In the Information & Communication sector, programmes such as the Training and TechSkills Accelerator (TeSA) Mid-Career Advance is helping to place more jobs and traineeships and attachment in areas such as user experience/interface design (UX/UI), digital marketing and network engineering.
In the Healthcare sector, the Professional Conversion Programme (PCP) for Nurses and Allied Health Professionals that mid-career locals can tap on to gain professional qualifications to take on roles such as nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, and diagnostic radiographers. Company-hosted traineeships and attachment opportunities as patient service associates and pharmacy assistants is also available.
For more traditional sectors, such as the Food Services sector, programmes such as the Job Redesign Reskilling Programme, introduced in Feb 2020, can help redesign jobs for the benefit of both employers and employees.
#5 Spotlight OnThe Financial Services Sector
Wrapping up the 16th edition of the Jobs Situation Report was a deeper dive into the Financial Services sector.
One thing that jumped out was that out of nearly 5,200 available opportunities, 96% were for PMET roles such as compliance, risk management, financial analysis, software development, relationship management and data analysis.
Salary ranges for roles with the highest number of job vacancies within the Financial Services sector were between $4,850 to $10,500.
In addition, MAS’ pilot Employment Outlook Survey with over 30 financial institutions in June 2020 also pointed to plans to create more than 1,800 net jobs from July 2020 to June 2021. This is despite the uncertain economic conditions such financial institutions were facing in June 2020, and still are faced with today.
Half of these hiring demand is for technology functions within financial institutions, including application developers, application architects and business analysts. There is also growth in private banking and wealth management, corporate banking, consumer banking and insurance.
Subscribe To The DollarsAndSense Business Pass
Enjoy what you are reading and want more? Join The DollarsAndSense Business Pass and unlock access to valuable tools, exclusive networking opportunities, and tap into the wisdom of industry experts to fuel your business expansion!
