Education Minister Heng Swee Keat on Thursday gave out 90 awards for the inaugural Singapore-Industry Scholarship (SgIS), launched in February with Government, private sector and a statutory board's participation. He spoke about how Singapore is facing challenges ahead by harnessing a three-pronged strategy - developing individual talent, creating new sources of competitive advantages, and deepening and broadening the way we view talent. This is an excerpt of his speech.
Published The Straits Times, 4 Aug 2012
Looking ahead, acting decisively, creating our future
WE ARE launching this [SgIS] scholarship at a time when the global economy is facing serious challenges. The United States, Europe and Japan are confronted with severe problems, including high and rising graduate unemployment. The overall unemployment rate for graduates in the euro zone is 11.7 per cent, with Greece at 37 per cent, Spain at 23 per cent, Italy and Portugal at 19 per cent.
With the economies of China and India slowing, their graduates are expressing concerns about job prospects. China alone will be producing a record 6.8 million new graduates in 2012.
In Singapore, the situation is quite different. Although the economy is slowing, our graduates are still getting good jobs, with the latest surveys showing that their starting salaries are continuing to rise. The difficult restructuring efforts in earlier years are now bearing fruit, allowing us to ride on the growth of Asia.
The key lesson is that to stay successful, we must always look ahead and take decisive action to create our desired future. With a successful and growing economy, Singaporeans can enjoy a high quality of life and our children can have good opportunities to fulfil their aspirations.
Looking ahead, we must use this opportunity to deepen our capabilities. Despite the current uncertainty in the global economy, many economies around the world have inherent competitive strengths. They have the advantages of big markets, abundant labour and vast talent pools; Singapore has none of these.
The global financial crisis is also forcing many developed economies to undergo significant restructuring. Many emerging economies are also building their manufacturing capabilities and investing significantly in R&D. When global growth returns, they will emerge fitter and stronger. It will be a different landscape.
Against this backdrop, to continue to provide opportunities for our people, we must adapt to stay special. We must be different, exceptional, in order to be of use. We have to be astute in maximising every advantage we have, such as our strategic location and our time zone, even our weather.
I know of at least one MNC which expanded its IT centre in Singapore after all its workers in the main centre could not reach the head office after a heavy snowstorm. Our airports are thankfully free from snowstorms or fogs.
Economics students learn the standard Ricardian trade theory that comparative advantages are based on factor endowment. While this is an important insight, some countries that enjoyed oil bonanzas later suffered from the "Dutch disease" or the resource curse, as currencies become overvalued and other export industries are hollowed out and workers' skills are degraded.
Indeed, many policymakers are realising that the competitiveness of an economy is based not just on factor endowment, but on competitive advantages created by society as a whole.
For instance, in Singapore, we have painstakingly built up, over the years, our reputation as a safe, trusted, reliable and connected hub. Our networks of free trade agreements connect us to all key economies. We enjoy political stability and the Government adopts rational and consistent principles in formulating policies.
Staying open to ideas, talent and capital
WE ARE open to ideas, talent and capital. Investors are prepared to sink in billions in investments, with the confidence that the rule of law prevails. All these make Singapore special and attractive to investors, and enable good jobs to be created.
The other major source of competitive advantage is, of course, our people. Again, we have been able to take advantage of an apparent paradox. In most markets, supply responds to demand. When there is a strong demand for particular goods, suppliers crank up production lines to produce more.
But when it comes to human talent, it is often the other way round - supply creates its own demand. Why is that so?
A strong supply of talent in a location attracts investors to invest there, thereby creating the demand for these talents and skills. Hence, a strong supply of talent creates the demand for it. This then sets off a multiplier effect - the growth in this sector, in turn, creates job opportunities for many other Singaporeans even if they are not directly employed in that industry in the first place.
For instance, a new factory creates jobs not just in the factory, but also jobs in SMEs that supply material, and even for taxi drivers and hawkers serving the workers.
The stronger the core of Singaporean talent, the better we are in anchoring a range of key industries. But developing talent takes years. Fortunately, we have a strong foundation. Many companies, global or home-grown, value the integrity and reliability, as well as the skills and adaptability of Singaporeans.
We must build on this and give every Singaporean an education that enables each to achieve his or her best. It is important that our investment in education keeps pace with technological change and the needs of industry so that all our students can benefit from the opportunities in the future.
But we have to go beyond the individual. Even as we seek to develop every Singaporean to the fullest, countries with vastly larger populations than ours will produce many more outstanding individual talents. But getting talented people to work together is often difficult, as any team leader or CEO will tell you.
Getting a society to achieve maximum results, and to allow all to enjoy the fruits of their collective efforts, is even harder. Several CEOs I met recently lamented how, in their countries, endless bickering among different factions is sapping their society. You can see that in the media reports on riots, strikes and protests. The morass that many economies are in today is testament to this difficulty. History is also full of stories of how societies fail after enjoying initial successes. We cannot take success for granted.
Hence, how we organise ourselves as a society is critical to our success. Having fully functioning teams and organisations is a basic building block. One senior official in a large emerging economy recently told me that he admired how Singapore has been able to blend the best of the East and West to enable us to achieve more as a society. We have been able to develop and enable talented individuals to flourish, while encouraging individuals to contribute to our collective success.
At the national level, we must build on the advantages - of trust, reliability, connectedness, stability and good governance - to create new sources of competitive advantages, such as intellectual depth, creativity and innovative capacity. And we must have a smart strategy of overcoming the limitations of our small size. Small can be beautiful, if we are nimble and open.
Singapore++ strategy
ONE aspect of this strategy is a Singapore++ strategy, which starts with nurturing a strong Singaporean core.
Building on this, the first plus is to complement our core with a right mix of global talent, to enable us to build the best multi-disciplinary team. The second plus is to ensure that Singaporeans have global cultural literacies to interact with people across cultures. We can play a special role in connecting people around the world, and make Singapore a shining Global-Asia node.
We have a multiracial, multicultural and multilingual heritage that we must cherish as this enriches our life. And if we can harness these well, we also create opportunities for our people as they will be sought after by companies, local and foreign, that use Singapore as a base to command their operations. Global cities with large numbers of inter-connected, highly educated workers will become the new factories where ideas and knowledge are produced.
In short, we must always seek to turn constraints into opportunities. By taking a three-pronged approach of developing individual talent, creating new sources of competitive advantages at the national level, and deepening and broadening the way we view talent, we can enable all Singaporeans to earn a "Team Singapore premium".
It is a premium that is derived from excellence at a systems level. I am convinced that with the right mindset, we can do it.
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