Skills and Workforce Development Agency Bill (2nd Reading Debate)
Gerald Giam (Aljunied GRC)
5 May 2026
I declare my interest as the owner and director of a company that provides software to training providers.
Mr Deputy Speaker, the Skills and Workforce Development Agency (SWDA) Bill officially consolidates career and employment services with skills training under a single administrative mandate. This is a welcome integration.
First, it has the potential to eliminate institutional silos. This lowers the risk of skills development and training occurring without an active alignment to available job vacancies.
Second, it could prevent fragmented journeys of jobseekers, reducing the friction for Singaporeans who previously had to navigate disparate digital platforms and physical agency locations for career coaching and skills upgrading.
Third, it could resolve data and administrative silos by integrating the training records formerly held by SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG) with employment and placement records held by Workforce Singapore (WSG). This integration has the potential to empower career coaches to provide holistic, data-driven interventions.
Policy Reversal and Accountability
The Bill fundamentally reverses the 2016 policy decision to bifurcate the then-Workforce Development Agency (WDA) into SSG and WSG. The Minister just explained that WSG remained under MOM to focus on strengthening employment facilitation services and programmes, while SSG moved under MOE to enable it to work more closely with our IHLs to drive the SkillsFuture movement. It is not clear to me why WDA had to be split in order to achieve this.
How will the Government measure the success of this merger compared to the 2016 separation? Specifically, what key performance indicators (KPIs) will the new Agency use to meaningfully tackle structural issues in labour mobility and skills development?
The new Agency’s functions straddle both education and manpower, yet no current political office holder spans both ministries. Does the Prime Minister intend to appoint a bridging political office holder, such as a Minister of State for Manpower and Education?
Cost of Re-merger
The Bill’s explanatory note states that this Bill will not involve the Government in any extra financial expenditure, but surely the cost of this re-merger will not be zero. Could the Minister enumerate the actual costs associated with this restructuring, including budgets set aside for rebranding efforts, the updating of physical and digital collaterals, as well as the integration of various IT and payroll systems, among other things, across the merging entities? Would the Minister share how these compare to the costs associated with separating these agencies in 2016?
Job Search
The Bill specifies that the Agency will provide for, or facilitate the provision of, career advisory and employment assistance services. Would the SWDA be providing job search assistance directly under this new integrated agency model?
Currently, the Government relies heavily on third parties, such as the Employment and Employability Institute (e2i) and other private career matching providers. If the SWDA were to directly provide these services, it would be able to leverage its access to MOM data regarding labour market mismatches and real-time hiring trends to adapt assistance in a more timely fashion to rapid economic shifts.
How would the Minister ensure performance accountability of the job search assistance provided by these external partners?
Job search assistance should not merely involve resume touch-ups and pointing jobseekers to employment portals. Will the Government commit to more intensive assistance in the job search process, particularly for those who have experienced persistent structural unemployment despite their most earnest efforts?
Let me set a scene. Today, many jobseekers apply for dozens of jobs daily without customising their resumes to the specific job descriptions. In parallel, organisations utilise automated tracking systems that filter applications strictly by their degree of match with the job description, sometimes discarding all applications that do not meet at least a 90% keyword match. Consequently, many qualified applicants may not get a call up for an interview. Will SWDA require job assistance programmes to guide jobseekers on such technical skills?
Will SWDA officers take on a more active role in bridging the gap between employer needs and candidate profiles? For instance, if the Agency identifies a candidate whose profile closely matches a job description, will officers proactively pitch this candidate to the employer and advocate for them to be considered for an interview? While the onus ultimately remains on the candidate to prove their worth during the interview, this active matching by the Agency would at least help jobseekers get their foot in the door.
Job assistance programmes should also actively bridge skill gaps in networking and help jobseekers leverage professional connections. Such skills are critically important and often not taught in formal schooling.
Education and Career Guidance
The Bill (Clause 68) specifies the transfer of properties, rights, and liabilities, which inherently includes the vast network of educational initiatives and career guidance programmes.
Students should be exposed to different careers earlier, ideally starting at the lower secondary level, when they will be choosing their O and N level subjects. This early intervention will steer students away from simply settling for subjects or courses they have no genuine interest in because they do not know any better.
Would the SWDA work directly with schools to provide systematic and regular career guidance or exposure to students? This would shift the burden of career guidance away from teachers and allow students to have some exposure to industry experts as they decide on what career best works for their individual goals and talents. This would not only lead to better personal outcomes but will also yield better long-term workforce outcomes.
To complement this early intervention, will the Government encourage university and polytechnic admissions offices to further expand their quotas for Aptitude-Based Admissions? We must shift the admissions weighting toward an applicant’s demonstrated passion and aptitude for a specific field, rather than relying too heavily on relative academic grade cut-offs.
Furthermore, will the Government work with the Institutes of Higher Learning to afford students greater flexibility to make mid-stream switches in their educational journeys without the fear of having to start from scratch? This will go some way in creating a workforce of the future that is adaptable, brave and agile.
Ultimately, these measures will minimise the systemic waste of public and private resources that occurs when graduates abandon courses and careers they were never genuinely interested in pursuing.
Harmonisation with External Partners
Next, I turn to the harmonisation with other partners. First, economic planning. While the Bill successfully merges functions that currently sit in MOM and MOE, the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) remains an underlying driver that sets the Industry Transformation Maps (ITMs).
The Agency has been described as a Jobs-Skills Integrator. However, the roadmap for our industries is set by the ITMs under MTI. Would the Minister explain how this new Agency will coordinate work with MTI to ensure that it harmonises ITMs with training curricula in real-time? Will the Minister be able to address the potential risks that by merging MOM and MOE functions, we are simply creating a new, larger silo that is disconnected from MTI’s strategic planning?
Second, the Community Development Councils. The CDCs have launched the Jobs Nearby @ CDC initiative to help Singaporeans find jobs closer to home. Would the Agency be tracking the performance of the initiative and help to train the job ambassadors?
Key Performance Indicators
Mr Speaker, good intentions do not survive without good measurement. Without clear, published performance indicators, this merger risks the same fate as the 2016 separation: celebrated at inception, reversed a decade later.
I would therefore suggest the Ministry consider the following KPIs for the Agency as a starting framework to ensure better accountability.
First, the proportion of public training subsidies going to courses that yield documented employment outcomes within six months. Public expenditure must be rigorously tracked against its economic purpose. We must move beyond simply tracking whether a jobseeker found any employment; the Agency should expand the existing Training Quality and Outcomes Measurement (TRAQOM) surveys to measure whether workers are actively applying their newly acquired competencies in their roles six months after they complete the course. By doing so, we ensure that every public dollar spent genuinely contributes to successful job placements or career advancement. SWDA should be required to publish these outcome-based figures annually.
Second, the percentage of subsidised training enrolments in courses mapped to documented Shortage Occupation List (SOL) occupations. Parliament should be able to see, year-on-year, whether the public’s training dollars are flowing toward the gaps our economy has actually documented.
Third, median time-to-employment following SWDA-assisted job searches, broken down by age band, PMET versus non-PMET status, and by individual service providers. The Government now publishes aggregate figures for these. Disaggregated figures will better hold the Agency and its service providers to account.
These are not novel metrics. They are the logical extension of data that SWDA will already hold. The integration the Bill promises makes these metrics achievable. The question is whether the Government is prepared to track and publish them.
Mr Deputy Speaker, ultimately, this merger must amount to more than a mere reshuffling of bureaucratic boxes. Administrative neatness means little to the displaced mid-career worker stuck in a job search blackhole, or the young student pressured into an educational path they have no passion for. The true test of the Skills and Workforce Development Agency will not be how smoothly it integrates its back-end systems, but its courage to embrace transparent KPIs, its willingness to proactively champion our jobseekers, and its agility to move at the speed of our economy. If we are reversing a decade-old policy in the name of deeper synergy, the Government must ensure that this synergy actually translates into tangible, measurable resilience for Singaporean workers.
Sir, notwithstanding the concerns raised, I support the Bill.