Skill sets become obsolete in just a few years, workers must acquire new skills seven or eight times over the course of their careers, and their superiors have a far bigger role in helping them achieve this, according to several HR experts.
This is not new, and employees all over the world appear to recognize the idea. In
Deloitte’s global survey of 10,400 business and human resource leaders, careers and learning was ranked the second most important trend – it was just fifth last year.
Erman Tan, president of the Singapore Human Resources Institute, advised employers to move toward recognizing new types of courses outside the traditional education system. "High-quality content and digital delivery models will be able to offer employees ready access to continuous learning,” he told The Straits Times.
Indranil Roy, Future of Work lead at Deloitte Southeast Asia, said careers are becoming longer due to rising life expectance while the time taken for a skill to lose relevance is being compressed to as little as five or six years.
"Lifelong learning has therefore become a prerequisite for success," Roy said as quoted by the newspaper.
And given that workforce growth is slowing, employers must develop their staff to their fullest potential, said Koh Juan Kiat, executive director of the
Singapore National Employers Federation.
Employers should continually invest in the skills of their employees. They can also tap schemes like professional conversion programmes to reskill the workers especially in technical areas such as aerospace, electronics and infocomm.
Some good practices, as cited by the Tripartite Alliance for Fair and Progressive Employment Practices:
-starting internal training centers with customized courses that address specific challenges
-rotating employees across offices, teams or countries to help them develop more well-rounded skills
Employees, for their part, should be prepared to take on new job roles and initiate requests to go on training if they lack skills for a particular job. The alliance manages the Human Capital Partnership programme that rewards progressive employees who develop their staff.
Russell Tham, Applied Materials South-east Asia regional president, said managers and workers at the company create employee development plans together. Such plans are aligned to job requirements and career interests.
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