1. Good afternoon to one and all.
2. First, I must thank SMRT for this wonderful initiative in collaborating with our five Polytechnics. I will explain why this collaboration is so important and significant, by approaching this from three perspectives – the company perspective, the individual’s perspective and the social perspective.
3. Some of you might wonder: Why is this collaboration with SMRT such a significant move, especially in terms of what we would like to see in the broader industry and academia ecosystem?
4. Firstly, from the industry perspective, there is sometimes feedback that students are not ready for the job market. And truth be told, we will never be entirely ready for the job market, because it is impossible for anyone to teach everything that our students and workers need to know for the rest of their lives.
5. We don’t believe that it is possible to front load everything at the beginning. On the other hand, we also know that companies like SMRT are commercial entities. You need to stay competitive, you need to provide a reasonable rate of return to investors.
6. The question is: how can we help our companies maintain their cutting edge so that we can continue to improve and bring out the best in our people and organisations?
7. In the world of commercial business, the competition is not for more resources, or in terms of size. What defines the competition is speed. Which corporation is fastest in evolving their practices over the years to be attuned to changes.
8. And if Singapore, including companies like SMRT, wants to evolve faster, then we must have a close and existing relationship between industry and academia so that the frontier knowledge generated by the industries can seep into our learning system and our academia as soon as possible.
9. And this will then accelerate the pace at which we can produce quality candidates and graduates for the industry with just-in-time knowledge, so that the best practices that we can find within industry can be combined with the best pedagogy and andragogy in academia, for us to produce the graduates that we want. This is how SMRT can keep improving and keep improving fast.
10. In order for Singapore to remain competitive, we have every reason to want to tighten this nexus between industry and academia.
11. Today’s SMRT’s collaboration with the polytechnics is a prime example of what we want to do, not just with SMRT, but with many other Queen Bee companies across the industry. I am confident that the industry and academia will benefit from this collaboration.
12. My second point is from the individual’s perspective. I used to say that I hope that all the workers who have stayed with SMRT for 20 years, would have stayed 1 x 20 years and not 20 x 1 year. The first means that the same worker is continuously growing throughout the 20 years, while the second means that the worker is constantly changed after every year.
13. One of the very important things for us in Singapore is to keep our people engaged and energised. This means ensuring each and every one of us have a sense of growth, and a sense of purpose.
14. I have never believed that Singaporeans are afraid of hard work, but Singaporeans, especially our younger generations, all want meaningful purpose. In order for us to provide that meaning and purpose to inspire people, we need to help our people to keep growing.
15. And that’s why this initiative is very important because it is not just about churning out another new batch of students and graduates who are ready for the market. It is very much about helping our people to keep learning throughout their lives. This helps employees of SMRT to have 1 x 20 years and not 20 x 1 year. This is an individual responsibility as much as it is a corporate responsibility.
16. Thank you, SMRT, for embarking on this initiative because it shows the commitment by our leading corporations to want to help our people. If our people keep growing and have a sense of purpose and mission, I’m quite certain that they will stay on and work for the company and for our country.
17. This brings me to my third point on why this initiative is important from the social perspective.
18. One of the challenges that we always have in any society, and in every business, is how do we keep our people together? How do we give them the assurance that regardless of the economic situation, everyone would continue to have an opportunity to keep growing and contribute to our society. It is simple and perhaps straightforward and maybe even expected that all corporations will ask this question, “How can we earn a respectable rate of return for our investors? How can we improve the bottom line?”
19. The usual matrix is to try to improve the top line. Try to do something to cut the costs so that we can increase the bottom line. That is one way of looking at it. But if we only look at it from this perspective, then sometimes the workers’ development and growth become collateral. Because we increase the bottom line.
20. One of the set ways could be to keep cutting the manpower to lower manpower costs. But what if we in Singapore have a different social compact from the usual capitalist system that, in striving for a respectable rate of return for the company, we also strive for growth in our people and in our workers’ incomes?
21. The two are not mutually exclusive. But in order to achieve both, we will need a different mindset where we set ourselves the twin goals of achieving respectable rate of returns with respectable rate of growth for our workers in income and development.
22. Then we need a different paradigm, a paradigm that says that we will keep investing in our people because we are not just talking about cutting costs. We are talking about the need to value add. We want each and every one of our workers — from the rank-and-file workers all the way to management — to be able to value add to the company, to create more and better value.
23. And if we can do that, then we will not only grow our bottom line, we will allow our people to keep pace with the evolving demands of the industry. And quicken the pace of economic development where everyone can feel that as the economy grows, they will also see their salaries and wages grow.
24. They too can continuously strive for a better quality of life for themselves and their families. And that is why I hope today’s example of the collaboration between SMRT and the Polytechnics will be a testimony of how our leading corporations in Singapore can combine workers’ growth with corporate growth. This must come from training and deep skilling.
25. And that is why it’s so important for us to work with major corporations like SMRT so that we do not see corporate growth and workers growth as two separate and distinct functions. Instead, they are one and the same. They are two sides of the same coin.
26. So from all these three vantage points, I am glad to see SMRT joining forces with our polytechnics, and I hope that many more Queen Bee companies like SMRT will also follow suit.
27. This is so that we can achieve a faster industry transformation with the combination of leading industrial practices and leading academia practices. We can also achieve individual and personal growth for our workers.
28. This will enable them to keep contributing more. They stay on with the organisation because they are not afraid of hard work, and because they want to develop their deep skills to feel that sense of hope.
29. Finally, from a social perspective, it is important for us to make sure that our corporate growth and our corporate development is combined with the individual development. In other words, as a corporation grows the rate of returns for its investors, our workers too feel that they are growing.
30. But to achieve this is not easy. It requires a deep commitment to training and development in our people so that they enable the success of the corporation.
31. I thank SMRT again, for working with us. The hard work is just starting, but we hope that this will be a successful example of the kind of industry-academia relationship that we can have between successful companies and our Institutes of Higher Learning, or as I always call them, our Institutes of Continuous Learning.
32. Thank you.
Source: Ministry of Education, Singapore
