Employment and training: We tell workers to keep learning. Do employers recognise what they learn?

We tell workers to keep learning. Do employers recognise what they learn?

https://www.straitstimes.com/opinion/we-tell-workers-to-keep-learning-do-employers-recognise-what-they-learn

Straits Times 

2026-11-07

By---Gog Soon Joo is senior director (special projects) at the Centre for Skills-First Practices at the Singapore University of Social Sciences’ Institute for Adult Learning.

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Fifty-five-year-old Woo Lai Yee spent almost 30 years in business development and sales at multinational companies. After she left work to care for her mother, she chose to move into eldercare. She took ownership of the switch, attending a healthcare leadership course and volunteering as a Silver Generation Ambassador, engaging more than 300 seniors.An active ageing centre saw that her corporate skills in setting targets, planning, supporting staff and building partnerships applied to a new role it had available. She became centre manager in less than two years. Woo did her part, and her employer looked past her job titles to the skills behind them.

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This happy outcome is an example of an employer being flexible about a career-switcher in terms of seeing that a person’s corporate background can still make them employable in an entirely different sphere.However, Woo’s hiring experience is unusual. What is more often the case is that a worker may have learnt to manage difficult clients, lead a team or solve operational problems, yet struggle to get recognised for those abilities when applying for a different role.Workers are told by the Government, employers and society to keep learning, build their skills and take charge of their career. But what good is lifelong learning if the labour market struggles to recognise what people have learnt? The hiring hurdlesSingapore has invested heavily in helping workers learn. Training participation among resident workers reached a record 54.8% in 2025. The new Skills and Workforce Development Agency (SWDA) now links training with career guidance and job matching. Yet hiring practice tells a different story.

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In the Ministry of Manpower’s Job Vacancies 2025 report, employers said academic qualifications were not the main factor for 79.6% of vacancies. In the same report, employers explained hard-to-fill professional, managerial and executive vacancies by a lack of specialised skills and relevant experience.“Relevant experience” sounds reasonable. In practice, it often means the same job title at a similar firm.

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A career switcher cannot pass that filter, however much he or she has learnt.Many employers see the value of skills-based hiring but few practise it fully. A 2025 Singapore Business Federation (SBF) survey of 555 member firms found that only 18% had adopted such hiring practices; 54% did so partly and 28% not at all.Among firms not fully on board, 42% doubted whether candidates with adjacent skills could do the job. Another 29% did not know how to assess skills without relying on CVs or qualifications. In workshops run by my centre with SBF, some employers described skills as “hard to pinpoint, difficult to measure”.

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The report added a third gap – even when one employer assesses a worker’s skills, another may not trust the result. A trusted and portable skills-signalling system is needed to help bridge this gap.On the other hand, when giving talks on adult learning to Singaporean workers of different ages and backgrounds, I encounter young people who take to the idea quickly. But others are sceptical. Some feel overwhelmed by the expectation to keep upgrading their skills and navigating career changes when what they really want is just a stable job.

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One participant who is a working mid-career professional told me that even just thinking about it gave him a headache because there was no clear sense of what employers wanted or whether the effort would pay off.

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People invest in learning when they see that it leads somewhere. But too often, a worker tells us that they complete a course and nothing changes at work. A mid-career job seeker applies for a new role and says that he or she hears nothing back because the job title on the CV does not match.A January 2026 survey of 375 Singapore hiring managers by Reeracoen and Rakuten Insight shows the same tension. More than three in four said recent training and skills development were essential when they assess applicants. Yet 56.3% named a lack of experienced candidates as a top hiring challenge, and 63% were hesitant about candidates out of work for more than three months. The gap is global. A 2024 Harvard Business School and Burning Glass Institute study of over 11,000 large American firms found that dropping degree requirements changed  fewer than one in 700 hires.Employers have good reasons to rely on degrees and job titles. A hiring manager with hundreds of applications needs a quick way to narrow the field. A degree shows that a trusted institution has assessed the candidate. A familiar job title shows similar work done elsewhere. Both reduce the risk of a bad hire.

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But paper qualifications say little about current ability. Shane Shi, managing director of civil engineering firm HSC Pipeline Engineering, tells me that a certificate earned 10 years ago could not tell him whether a person could adapt to his firm’s new digital workflows.

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What employers can doEmployees move across disciplines based on what they can do. A quantity surveyor became a project engineer. A senior project manager moved into a digital role and now builds workflow automation tools.Take mechanical and electrical contractor DLM. Short of skilled workers, it rewrote roles such as project engineer around the skills the work requires and trained its interviewers to assess every candidate against the same criteria.Some steps about what employers can do to recognise relevant job skills beyond paper qualifications are set out in the Skills-First Framework for Action. These include writing job advertisements around the work. Before asking for a degree or five years in a specific role, define what the role must deliver.Another is: Test ability directly. Work samples and practical tasks show what a candidate can do. Certifications then serve as supporting evidence.There is also a need to equip employers to assess with confidence. Firms, especially small ones, need shared assessment tools, clear legal guidance and examples of what works.Jobs and workflows redesigned to meet business goals also give staff real opportunities to use new skills and add value. Progression and pay should then follow demonstrated skills. Without this, workers get through the door and then stall.Training providers must also do more. Most of their effort goes into the middle mile of teaching and assessment. In the first mile, they should help learners decide, before they enrol, whether a course fits their goals. In the last mile, they should help learners show competence through real work, such as projects and work attachments.Workers have their part to play, too. Instead of listing job titles and certifications on their CV, they can describe what they achieved: a process improved, a team led, a cost cut. Samples and results of their work give employers evidence they can trust, as Woo’s volunteering did.This framework could help address the gap between agreeing that skills matter and having a workable way to recognise them. When more employers start recognising and building on these skills, the participant who found all this a headache may one day see learning as the step that led to the next job.

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Gog Soon Joo is senior director (special projects) at the Centre for Skills-First Practices at the Singapore University of Social Sciences’ Institute for Adult Learning.

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