Career centres have helped 18,300 job seekers, placed 11,400 of them

SINGAPORE — When colour and specialty chemicals company Archroma had to move its laboratory team to Thailand, it had to retrench five local employees. The company alerted the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) five months before the retrenchments took place last month, enabling Government agency Workforce Singapore to provide on-site briefing and career advice to the affected employees.

Archroma is among about 200 companies that have given advance notice of retrenchments to the MOM, but they are still the minority and are typically the bigger firms, said Manpower Minister Lim Swee Say on Friday (Nov 25).

Giving an update on its mission since its formation in March, the chairman of the Taskforce for Responsible Retrenchment and Employment Facilitation, Mr Tan Choon Shian, said the five career centres of Workforce Singapore and the Employment and Employability Institute (e2i) have helped 18,300 job seekers — including 3,000 retrenched workers — from January to September this year, and placed 11,400 of them.

About one in three of the job seekers assisted and placed was younger than 40. Almost four in 10 were PMETs, and the same proportion of job seekers was the long-term unemployed. A slightly lower proportion of the job seekers who were long-term unemployed — 35 per cent — was helped to find jobs.

Employers who have hired retrenched workers under various schemes of the government’s Adapt and Grow initiative shared their experience with Mr Lim, who was visiting the Lifelong Learning Institute on Friday. Those in the security sector said keeping workers for more than two weeks was a challenge, while other employers said a concern was workers leaving when they received higher salary offers from other companies.

Mr Tan Jit Khoon, chief executive of Winson Press, suggested incentives for workers to stay on for at least a year. He said business costs were too high and added that workers need to have the right attitude to be helped by the career coaches.