1. Good morning, everyone. Today, I was invited to share with you some thoughts on human capital. Perhaps the easiest way for me to start off this morning is with a poll. I would like to pose 3 sets of questions to you. There's no right or wrong answer. I would just like to know your answer, so that I can better understand how people see the world.
2. Question number one, many people have talked about future-ready skills and hard skills but fundamentally, the question is this, do we go for breadth or depth?
3. Second question, 15 versus 50. We typically spend 15 years in school, and we typically spend 50 years or more in the workforce. Where is the centre of gravity for education? 15 versus 50?
4. Lastly, hunt or farm? Should we be hunters or farmers?
Breadth, Depth or Speed?
5. Let me explain why these three questions are framed in such a way. I note that we are evenly split between breadth and depth, but my answer to the first question is, none of the above.
6. A lot of people ask, should we focus on breadth or depth? Some people can do many things well. But many people can only do some things well. Whether it is breadth or depth, it is not a question that we can answer at the system level. If we choose one or the other, we will fall into the trap of trying to standardise the average individual and teaching to the average. The challenge for education in the next lap is not mass access to education, at least not for Singapore. The challenge for Singapore in the next lap is how we have mass customisation for education that depends on the capabilities, the passions, the interests of our students, for us to develop their respective strengths.
7. Some people are more suited for depth, and some people are more suited for breadth. Hence, the real job of an educator is to be able to distinguish the respective strengths and weaknesses of the individual and help the individual to realise his or her potential. The real competitive advantage for the individuals and country as a collective is neither breath nor depth. The most important thing is speed - speed of evolution and speed of adaptation.
8. In Singapore's education system, we are not trying to train our students to answer yesterday or today's questions with yesterday's or today's answers. Our challenge is how to allow them to find most importantly, the questions framed for tomorrow and the answers ahead of time. In a highly competitive world, whatever they learn will be outdated. So, what should we teach our students?
15 or 50 Years of Education?
9. This morning, I had a conversation with some of you and this was one of the questions. If we can only teach our students one thing, what would that be? What is the most important skill that we can teach our students?
10. I would just say one thing – learning to learn, and learning to learn on your own throughout life. That is the most important skill. How will we ignite passion and a sense of curiosity throughout life? Content and knowledge is going to be commoditised. Access to information is going to be commoditised. In fact, there will be so much information that accessing information will not be the competitive advantage. The competitive advantage is our students' ability to distil from the information overload, to discern the values and most importantly, to be able to discover and create new value propositions.
11. That leads us to the second question – 15 or 50? Most education systems in the world are focused on 15 years of education and trying to get it right. For us, my belief is that that the game changer for the next lap is not the first 15 years, but how we invest and continue to invest in the next 50 years. It is not 15 or 50, but 15 for 50.
12. The first 15 years is for us to establish the foundation, ignite a sense of curiosity and passion, and understand the basics of numeracy, digital literacy and all kinds of foundational skills. But beyond foundational skills, what we need and the compelling value proposition for us is how we continue to invest in the next 50 years of our students' lives. That is why in the next year, you will hear more announcements about how we intend to rebalance, or invest much more in the adult life cycle.
13. The half-life of major companies has shortened from 50 to 15 years. The average lifespan of a person in our company has also been dramatically shortened. On the assumption that the average lifespan of a worker in the same job is 5 years, every year on average, 20% of our people need to be reskilled. Take Singapore as an example, we have 2.5 million Singaporeans, 3.5 million in the workforce. Let's take 2.5 million Singaporeans. If 20% of Singaporeans need to be reskilled and upskilled every year, that is half a million. Every cohort, we only need to graduate 40,000 students which include degrees, diplomas and vocational certificates. But 40,000 versus 500,000, that is one order of magnitude of difference.
14. For most countries, people are perhaps focusing on the flow of getting good students to enter the labour market. That is necessary, but inadequate.
15. For us, the challenge is how do we reskill our people at scale and at speed? Let's bear in mind that it's harder to reskill workers rather than young students. Young students are easy to teach because they are a captive audience. They turn up to study in school every day and do their homework. The pedagogy to teach within the 10-year timeframe is relatively simple. They all belong to the same generation. To try and reskill adult workers with their family responsibilities, financial commitments and time pressures, that will be a different thing. To teach the same subject to someone who's 25 years old, versus 65 years old, requires a different pedagogy altogether. This pedagogy is also required to deliver at scale and speed, and not with the conventional model of having people go back to school.
16. The idea is not for people to go back to school, but to learn anything, anywhere, anytime. That is the holy grail. Hence, it's not 15 or 50, it is 15 for 50.
Hunt or Farm Talent? (Wait or Shape?)
17. Last but not least, hunt or farm?
18. Most people are still in "hunter mode" across the world. If you look at how much money and resources a company spends on training, farming, and growing their own people, versus recruitment or the R&D budget, you will find that today in most companies, including many major MNCs, the capital development or human capital development budget is a fraction of what we do for R&D, sales and so forth. That speaks to the difference between the espoused vision as expressed in this room where everyone knows that we need to grow our own people, versus the expressed behaviour where most people go to the market to poach and search for talent. Very often, it's a prisoner's dilemma. It is the tragedy of the commons because everybody tries to get the trained worker from someone else - but not enough want to grow their own. For us to really made a breakthrough, we need to put in much more effort to farm, beyond trying to hunt.
19. As a corollary to this third question, do you wait or do you shape?
20. If you wait, you can wait for people to graduate from the polytechnics and universities and hope that miraculously, the perfect worker will turn up at your doorstep. But as I was trained in the military, hope is not a method. Or you have a choice – and you can choose to shape people. To shape means that you have to close the loop between frontier technological practices and frontier business practices with academia.
21. My hypothesis is whichever country that can close the loop or narrow the gap between frontier practices with academia, that country wins. Singapore must do this well. How do we do it? By getting the companies into the polytechnics and universities, and even in the schools, which I had invited some of you to participate in. The earlier you go in and work with academia to shape talent, the higher the chances of you getting the workers that you need, in time to come, instead of passively waiting.
22. So, I hope you will join us in this journey to shape talent, and not just to wait. I invite you to farm, and not just to hunt. I invite you to always bear in mind that the 15 is for the 50, and it is not the PSLE or O Level scores that matters, it is what we keep learning throughout life that matters. Fundamentally, it is neither breadth nor depth, it is the speed of evolution that determines our competitiveness. With that, I am happy to take your questions and hear your thoughts as well. Thank you.