SINGAPORE – To allow students to better track the skills and competencies needed to enter the workforce, business and employer federations are looking to partner schools to run programmes that will offer students and teachers a taste of the working world.
Forward Singapore is an ongoing, year-long public engagement exercise that will lay out the roles and responsibilities of the Government and citizens in the coming years. Each of the six pillars that discussions are centred on is headed by a 4G minister. SNEF executive director Sim Gim Guan, who participated in the engagement, said current school-business collaborations are ad hoc and dependent on the network that each school has with businesses. He added that institutionalising such arrangements will achieve better outcomes for schools and firms.
For instance, under a partnership between Yuying Secondary School and food company Super Bean International, the students learnt about the process of creating and marketing a food product, as well as heard from company representatives about their entrepreneurship journey. Mr Sam Liew, managing partner of IT firm NCS’ government strategic business group, said school-industry collaborations could help firms, especially those facing a talent crunch, by allowing them to reach students directly with internship openings, and possibly create pathways for students to become full-time employees.
While there are avenues for parents to speak with their children’s schools and teachers, she noted, these could at times be unsettling because schools’ communication with parents is likely to be performance-based.