Singapore Turns to the Demand Side of Skills Training:Why Building Supply Isn't Enough
By: Ben Wildavsky
If you build it, will they come? That question, applied to skills training, has been on my mind since I visited Singapore last year to research a book chapter about its national lifelong learning initiative, SkillsFuture. In just over a decade, Singapore has built the world’s most ambitious and comprehensive national infrastructure for continuous skill-building. Its credits to pay for classes become available to citizens at age 25, then again in a much higher amount when they turn 40. Along with subsidies to providers, analytical tools, and institutional partnerships, those credits have created a supply side that no other country has matched.
Singapore put its initiative in place with characteristic top-down planning, featuring close collaboration between the government, education providers, employers, and labor unions. Yet even a well-resourced, carefully designed system has left large numbers of Singaporeans unconvinced that upgrading their skills is urgent.
Participation in training supported by SkillsFuture Singapore grew from 418,000 individuals in 2016, one year after its launch, to more than 600,000 in 2025, or about one-fifth of the small nation’s resident workforce, according to Singapore’s then-manpower minister. In the program’s first decade, 46 percent of eligible Singaporeans used their SkillsFuture credit. That’s significant growth, but it’s far from universal engagement.
Funding and jump-starting a range of education and training offerings is necessary but not sufficient. “The demand side has been neglected for a long, long time,” Soon Joo Gog, one of the architects of SkillsFuture, told me. She argues that changing how individuals and employers behave matters as much as financing and building the training system itself.
Part of the problem is that in a full-employment economy, many workers with busy lives don’t feel any urgent need to upgrade their skills. That’s particularly true for those with less education and fewer in-demand skills, whose prospects in a changing economy are most likely to be expanded by upskilling. Participation rates in SkillsFuture training are much higher for professionals, managers, and executives than for clerical and blue-collar workers.
Gog, now based at the Centre for Skills-First Practices at the Singapore University of Social Sciences, says “short-termism” is also a barrier to greater employer participation. Many firms remain reluctant to prioritize training over the faster, cheaper option of hiring from the open market. Gog calls neglecting workers’ future skills a “boardroom failure.” Small and medium-sized businesses, which employ 70 percent of Singapore’s
workforce, are less likely than large firms to train their own employees, and some are reluctant to grant workers leave to take outside classes.
In July, the government merged SkillsFuture Singapore with the national workforce agency to form the new Skills and Workforce Development Agency. Its central goals include equipping employers to invest in workforce development, from adopting “skills-first” practices to expanding workplace learning.
The considerable spread of lifelong learning in Singapore, though still incomplete, means there’s good reason to consider it a reform laboratory like no other. But the challenges that remain are ones other countries are sure to encounter in some form. The United States is now investing a lot in the supply side, from new Workforce Pell grants and programs to billions in state funding for short-term credentials. Singapore’s experience suggests that building it is the easy part. Now leaders need to figure out what it will take for workers and employers to come.
