SPEECH BY MR LEE YI SHYAN, MINISTER OF STATE FOR TRADE AND INDUSTRY AT THE SINGAPORE HUMAN RESOURCES AWARDS 2007 HELD ON 6 JULY 2007 AT 7PM, MERITUS MANDARIN SINGAPORE

Mdm Ho Geok Choo

President of Singapore Human Resources Institute

Distinguished guests

Ladies and gentlemen

A very good evening to all of you. I am delighted to be here this evening to join you in celebrating the successes and accomplishments in the Human Resource fraternity.

Talent as the key competitive advantage of today’s businesses

An Economist article entitled “The Battle for Brainpower” published in 2006 showed that three-quarters of the international HR managers surveyed said that attracting and retaining talent was their number one priority. About 62% of these human resource managers worried about company-wide talent shortages. A 2007 Talent Shortage Survey by Manpower Inc.[1] which included nearly 37,000 employers across 27 countries and territories revealed that 41% of employers worldwide are having difficulty filling positions due to lack of available talent in their markets.

These findings do not surprise us, especially at a time when growth is strong in most markets. A week ago, I was in Saudi Arabia. I was told that a petrochemical company was urgently looking to hire 500 chemical engineers to staff their various projects. It is a well known fact by now that the oil and gas industry, the engineering industry and the construction industry in many markets are facing great shortage of workers, especially engineers. After all, talents and skilled workers are mobile. Hence, for companies to grow, they need to attract and retain talents. For the economy to expand, it needs talents and workers, with the right skill sets and at the correct quantity.

As Geok Choo said in her speech, here in Singapore we have a strong tripartite approach to human resource development. In fact, human resource development has been a key strategy to improve Singapore’s economic competitiveness all these years since our independence. The government spends up to 4% of GDP in education yearly. We also have, over the years, developed a comprehensive suite of programmes to train and re-skill our workers.

As globalization gathers pace, as our economy continues to restructure, new jobs will be created and old jobs will be lost. To stay relevant, our workforce must continue to learn and acquire new skills. It used to be that a good college degree would last a person’s life-long career. The reality today is that whether you are a professional or blue-collar worker, whether you are a functional specialist or a CEO, you have to learn, un-learn and re-learn many times in your working life to stay relevant and be able to add value to your organization.

Capacity building for the HR Professionals

With regards to continually learning, I would like to commend SHRI, for the many great things it is doing for the HR fraternity. Geok Choo has mentioned some of them in her speech earlier. I would also like to particularly recognize the joint efforts of WDA and SHRI in organizing the “Communities of Practice” sessions. I understand that at these sessions, Human Resource practitioners shared their experiences and practices in managing difficult issues such as Ageing Workforce Management, Service Leadership, Employee Engagement and Leadership Development.

Next, I am also encouraged to learn that WDA and SHRI are working towards a new framework for Workforce Skills Qualifications (or WSQ as commonly known) for the Human Resource Professionals. The new Human Resource WSQ will be benchmarked against the world’s best Human Resource practices and operationalized by integrating the standards developed into both the Pre-Employment Training, and the Continuing Education and Training systems.

The intention is to provide a unifying set of standards, articulating the skills and performance criteria of a Human Resource professional. A high standard of HR professionalism will in turn attract the best talents into the HR practices. Over time, a professional and leading HR practices will add to managerial depth and competitiveness of the firms here.

Capacity building at the SME CXO level

When we speak of skills upgrading and training in the company setting, we usually take it to mean training for the workforce, or specialist staff, and everyone else except the bosses. Given that new knowledge is created every second, and competition is born ever minute, I think it is critical for owners and leaders of companies to learn even faster, ahead of his team in order to provide directions.

With this intent in mind, SPRING Singapore recently launched a $20mil Management Development Programme a few months ago to encourage CXOs of Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to attend customized Executive MBA and Executive Development courses co-organized by NUS, NTU and SMU.

This programme sends a strong signal that learning must start from the top. We hope the programme will help enhance the managerial and leadership qualities of our SMEs’ bosses. SPRING targets to train 1,000 SME leaders and managers in the next 5 years.

Conclusion

Going forward, the ability to learn and re-learn will be a distinguishing feature of any competitive organization in the new economy. Human resource development, i.e.. imparting the right skills, knowledge and values to the different sections of staff in an organization will have to be carried out continually throughout the lifetime of the organization to stay relevant. Thankfully, here in Singapore, our private sector, union and the government work closely to support capacity building in human resources at all levels: individual, company and workforce. This tradition of partnership is a great strength of our system.

On this note, I would like to congratulate all the winners of this year’s Singapore Human Resource awards. We need outstanding HR professionals and world-class leading HR practices to make Singapore Inc. – the most admirable company to work for.

Thank you.