Speech by Minister Lim Hng Kiang at the NUS Business School Eminent Business Alumni Awards 2014 at Grand Mandarin Ballroom, Mandarin Orchard Singapore by Meritus

Professor Bernard Yeung, Dean, NUS Business School,

Mr Peter Seah, Chairman of the Awards Committee,

Dr Michael Teng, President of MBA Alumni–NUS,

Mr Sonny Yuen, President of the NUS Business School Alumni Association,

Mr Kwek Chok Ming, President of NUS Business School Mandarin Alumni

Distinguished Guests,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Good evening. I am delighted to join you at the NUS Business School Eminent Alumni Awards 2014. These awards recognise alumni who have excelled in the field of business, or have strong management competencies in both the private and public sectors. I understand that this year’s recipients come from a wide range of sectors, including healthcare, logistics, real estate, and agriculture. This diversity attests to the versatility of the graduates from the NUS Business School.

Today also marks the start of a series of events to celebrate NUS Business School’s 50th anniversary in 2015, coinciding with celebrations for Singapore’s 50 years of independence. Clearly, NUS Business School, and the University more broadly, has grown with Singapore. Your story is part of the Singapore story.

Singapore’s economic transformation over the past 5 decades

Some of you may not have experienced life in Singapore fifty years ago. Back then, poverty was common. Our GDP per capita was less than US$320, and unemployment was high at 13 per cent. Our infrastructure was a far cry from what we enjoy today. Few had the opportunity to pursue a university education, let alone post-graduate degrees in business management.

In our journey of developing Singapore’s economy, we first started with labour-intensive factories that produced items such as garments, toys, wood products and hair wigs. These factories created employment and filled the stomachs of the workers. But as you can expect, they were far from productive or the best in class.

Over the past 50 years, we saw a need to change our economic development policies. As a small island-nation with limited domestic resources, we could not afford to compete in the global market purely based on costs. Instead, we had to move up the value chain to higher-value activities. This meant investing in our workers, in equipment and in technology. 

Indeed, our past economic restructuring efforts caused growing pains for our forefathers and perhaps even some of us here as well. Lower value-added sectors like textiles were downsized, causing workers to be retrenched. Many had to pick up new skills as their old jobs disappeared and new jobs surfaced, requiring different skills. New industries also emerged, such as biomedical sciences.

Today, Singapore is recognised as one of the best places in the world to do business. US-based research institute Business Environment Risk Intelligence and the Economist Intelligence Unit ranked Singapore top in the world for our investment potential and business environment respectively.  Singapore is now also known as a business and financial hub for Asia and the world. More importantly, the quality of life and prosperity that Singaporeans enjoy today is a marked improvement from what our parents or grandparents knew 50 years ago.

Working with educational institutions and industry to equip Singaporeans for good jobs 

While our economic situation today is quite different from fifty years ago, our hopes and dreams remain the same – we want a better future for ourselves and our children. To help Singaporeans meet these aspirations, the Government will continue to pursue high quality economic growth that will create good job opportunities for all Singaporeans. We will continue to invest in equipping our people with a strong foundation in the academic, technical and professional domains, so that they are able to seize these opportunities.

In our tertiary education landscape, we currently have four autonomous universities, five polytechnics and three Institute of Technical Education (ITE) colleges. These institutions have different strengths and areas of focus, but share the same core objective –to equip their students with the relevant skills and competencies to achieve successful and meaningful careers.

With new trends and developments constantly emerging, our institutions will need to continually refresh their programmes to ensure that the skills taught remain relevant to industry needs. This is especially important as our economy restructures and upgrades, creating new niches and new jobs. 

For instance, given the increasing focus on data analytics, NUS and IBM have jointly established the NUS Centre for Business Analytics in partnership with the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB). The Centre aims to help students and mid-career professionals acquire skills in analysing and interpreting data, and to prepare them for high value jobs in the future.

Need for more deliberate efforts to develop soft skills

It is important for our students to have a strong base of hard skills in their academic, technical or professional field of work.   Indeed, the competency and strong work ethic of our local workforce have been key factors that give companies the confidence to locate high-value activities in Singapore. 

However, we must also focus on developing our students’ soft skills such as strong leadership, emotional awareness, and communication skills. We can expect employers to place greater emphasis on such soft-skills as Singapore continues on our path to be a key business hub for the world, and employees increasingly need to coordinate and cooperate with counterparts across the world. I am therefore heartened to note that our universities, including NUS Business School, are taking deliberate efforts to inculcate their students with these skills.

Important to be prepared and flexible to cope with the future

Nobody knows with certainty what the next fifty years will hold for Singapore. Nonetheless, if we use past experience as a guide, our economy will continue to evolve as we continue to move towards higher-value activities and as new technologies emerge. Just as the seniors amongst us have had to learn to use e-mail, the Internet, Facebook and Whatsapp in quick succession over the past decade or so, the young generation of today will need to be prepared to pick up new skills swiftly. New sectors and jobs will emerge, displacing existing ones. Companies will come and go. And as the life cycles of our industries  shorten, workers at all levels will  need to keep learning and upgrading themselves, whether to adapt to changes or to seize opportunities as they emerge.

On our part, the Government will continue to support Singaporeans’ lifelong learning efforts through further investments in continuing education and training (CET). This year, two CET campuses have been built. The Lifelong Learning Institute at Paya Lebar and the Devan Nair Institute of Employment and Employability at Jurong will deliver dedicated one-stop services in training and placement. Both institutes will be able to train 50,000 workers annually. The Workforce Development Agency (WDA) will also develop an online education, training and career guidance portal so that individuals can track their skills and training development. It will also raise the professionalism of coaches to deliver better career guidance, so that our workers can make better decisions. 

The Government will also continue to work with tripartite partners including NTUC and Singapore National Employers Federation to help retrenched workers identify suitable career opportunities and prepare for their next job. NTUC’s Employment and Employability Institute (e2i) and the Ministry of Manpower’s Jobs Bank will be key players in this effort.

Conclusion

As the alumni of the NUS Business School, you will play a big part in the future of Singapore, being the present and future business leaders of Singapore. Just as society and your companies have invested in you to make you who you are today, I hope that you will likewise invest in your workers, to help nurture them to their full potential. Together, we can bring Singapore to new heights of prosperity and progress.

On this note, I would like to conclude by thanking the organisers for inviting me today. Congratulations to all the Award recipients, and I wish you every success in your future endeavours. Thank you.