Published Date: 19 August 2022 07:00 PM
News Speeches
Vocational and Technical Education Development in the Post-pandemic Era needs to focus on 3Cs: Continual Learning, Connections and Collaboration, and Creation of New Solutions for Tomorrow’s Challenges
Your Excellencies;
Distinguished Guests;
1. Good evening. Thank you for inviting me to speak today.
2. The theme of today’s conference: Vocational and Technical Education Development in the Post-pandemic Era – New Changes, New Ways and New Skills, is indeed an apt one for our generation.
3. We will experience three major forces that will shape the long-term vision of education:
4. Our vocational institutions need to evolve, not just to respond and react; but to anticipate, adapt and advance. We will need to innovate through these three ‘C’s:
5. Let me elaborate.
6. The traditional way of preparing a course, training the trainers and finally graduating the students, which typically takes a few years, will need to change as skills taught may become obsolete not long after students graduate.
7. No amount of prior learning in school will be adequate. Therefore, we need to shift our mindsets from frontloading education to Learning for Life; learning for the rest of our lives and learning throughout life.
8. This must start with our trainers. We must equip our trainers with the right industry-relevant skillset so that they can in turn equip the learners to meet the demands of a fast-evolving market. Trainers must also have the right teaching tools to enhance the learning experience for our students. But most importantly, our trainers must have the right mindset for lifelong learning and be willing to upgrade and retrain themselves to acquire the right skillsets.
9. Next, we need to overcome the asymmetry of information and awaken the interests of the working adults in reskilling and upskilling. In Singapore, we have gone some way with the SkillsFuture Movement but more remains to be done. Three key areas that we need are to help our companies articulate the demand for future skills, aggregate these into sectoral demand for new skills, and lastly to activate the supply of such future skills to meet these needs. Only then can we ensure individuals are interested in learning for life and learning through life.
10. But no party can do this alone. Our institutions need to partner with government agencies, industry associations and companies to identify skills in demand and co-create, and even co-teach short and stackable courses for working adults.
11. This brings me to my next point.
12. We must be connectors to collaborate.
13. Our institutions in Singapore also continue to connect and reconnect with the world through their overseas exchange and internship programmes. For example, the Institute of Technical Education has an agreement with Shenzhen STS Microelectronics Co. Ltd, allowing students to participate in virtual internships.
14. The example also shows the importance of the connection between academia and industry.
15.. This brings us to our final ‘C’.
16. Education cannot be about solving today’s problems with yesterday’s or today’s solutions only.
17. Instead, education needs to draw out and even create knowledge from all institutions and industries together, not just locally but also internationally, to pre-empt and solve tomorrow’s challenges with new ideas and new approaches.
18. Constant innovation to our education system is essential. As a nation, we can be more resilient learners and innovators, who make connections and collaborate with people of different cultures and backgrounds, to improve lives.
19. We look forward to learning from your sharing and best practices in this conference. Thank you.
Last Updated: 19 Aug 2022