Skills mismatch is a major problem worldwide, but it can be fixed: President Tharman
President Tharman Shanmugaratnam said the skills mismatch is a problem that can be fixed with the right policy initiatives.
SINGAPORE - More internships and use of technology can bridge the gap between what people are trained for and what is in demand in the market, said President Tharman Shanmugaratnam.
“The massive mismatch of skills – it’s not just a developing country problem. It’s a problem in the United States, in the UK, everywhere,” said Mr Tharman in a fireside chat, held after the inaugural meeting of the High-level Advisory Council on Jobs on Oct 23 at the World Bank building in Washington, DC.
However, Mr Tharman, who is co-chairperson of the council with former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet, said the skills mismatch is a problem that can be fixed with the right policy initiatives.
“We have to close the gap between employers and educational institutions by increasing internships, increasing what’s called the dual education mode, where people study and work at the same time.”
He said technology can also help in getting a lot more granular information on what employers need and then feeding it into training institutions’ curricula.
“Essentially, we need fairly wholesale reform in tertiary education and in skills development systems around the world to tackle this mismatch of skills.”
The need to reform the pre-university and university curriculum and upgrade workforce skills was recognised by Singapore a while ago.
The country has been taking steps to create a more variegated tertiary education landscape across its colleges, universities and polytechnics in the past several years. Additionally, the Republic has launched several initiatives to strengthen the relevance of skills training for the existing workforce.
The High-level Advisory Council on Jobs, announced in August, is a World Bank initiative aimed at identifying actionable policies and programmes to address the looming jobs crisis in the developing world.
The council’s first meeting and the fireside chat were part of the nearly week-long annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to be concluded on Oct 26 in the US capital.
The World Bank estimates that over the next 10 years, an unprecedented 1.2 billion young people in the developing world will become working-age adults. Meanwhile, the job market is expected to create only 420 million jobs – leaving nearly 800 million without a clear path to prosperity.
Mr Tharman said job creation is one of three defining challenges of our time, and creating more jobs is the only way to ensure success in dealing with the other two challenges – tackling climate change, and preserving an open rules-based international order, needed to keep trade, investment and data flowing, and to keep the peace.
“We have to give urgency to job creation,” he said. “If we don’t do that, it’s going to be very hard to sustain domestic support anywhere (for measures to tackle) climate change. It’s going to be very hard to sustain support anywhere for an open world order.”
However, the President stressed that success in job creation is not about reaching an end state.
“Success is a process. Success is about getting onto learning curves – enabling workers and firms, and clusters of firms within an industry, to learn by doing; skills begetting skills, and moving up the value chain over time,” he said.
“Success is about rising aspirations, and about changing the political economy of a country so that policymakers are rewarded for reform and for keeping an economy inserted in the global economy, rather than closing in on themselves.”
Mr Tharman said there are also new challenges, such as ensuring everyone gets the benefit of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution and, more broadly, the digital economy.
While decarbonisation is a challenge itself, governments will also have to make sure that it becomes an opportunity to create new jobs, he said.
Then there is the challenge of adjusting to new global value chains, which are not disappearing but are being reorganised, he added.
Speaking at the fireside chat, Mr Ajay Banga, president of the World Bank, said Mr Tharman made an important point at the council meeting about climbing up the ladder of a good job.
“To climb a ladder, you have to get your hands on the bottom of the ladder so you can climb the rungs,” he said. “I think what we have to do is to be careful to not prejudge everything from one eyesight, but to remember the alternative of not having a job is a really poor alternative for young people and women.”
Mr Banga added: “There’re many things about jobs that I don’t want to qualify into good and bad, formal and informal, good and better. I want to first start with jobs. I want to start with the dignity of a job, and then I want to work our way up that ladder to always improve a person’s chance.
“The process that President Tharman talked about, the process is as important as the end. That’s where we’d like to go,” he said.
On Oct 23, Mr Tharman also attended a high-level event convened by the World Bank and the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, which he co-chairs.
He noted that the world will have to make a shift to consume more plant-based proteins, as the current global reliance on animal-based proteins is unsustainable. Animal-based foods, in particular beef, are far more water-intensive to produce and are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.
Shifting away from this can be done without reducing individual choice, but by providing affordable and tasty alternatives, and investing in alternative proteins, he said.
He also noted that the shift to renewable energy and AI could potentially be very water-intensive. Countries, therefore, have to be more energy- and water-efficient in how they deploy renewable energy – such as in the cleaning of solar panels and the operating of cooling towers for nuclear power plants – as well as in data centres and semiconductor production, he added.
Mr Tharman said that amid global tensions, water can be a lever to rebuild global trust in multilateralism. Noting that people will see the benefits, such as fewer spikes in food prices, he said: “Solving the water crisis and stabilising the global water cycle is not just about benefits 50 years from now. We’re avoiding huge costs in time, but the benefits start flowing immediately.”
Comments