Masterclasses to help HR personnel win war for talent
SINGAPORE — About 300 senior managers and human resource (HR) practitioners will be learning more about talent attraction, management and retention through a series of “masterclasses”, launched yesterday as part of national SkillsFuture initiative.
The classes are run by the Singapore Workforce Development Agency (WDA) and the Singapore National Employers Federation (SNEF).So far, 35 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and 15 multinational corporations (MNCs) have come on board.
Classes will be in the form of workshops, seminars and conferences, and will touch on strategic HR management, talent development and motivation and business management. The first masterclass, Winning the War for Talent, starts in July and has an intake of 30 participants. During the one-day workshop, participants will engage in discussions on the current state of talent management and do role-play exercises on managerial coaching.
Another five masterclasses will be pushed out over the next two years.
Bay Hotel Singapore, which has 135 employees, was one of the companies at the launch yesterday. The hotel’s HR manager Yvonne Lim felt that the SkillsFuture movement will benefit SMEs such as her company, and the emphasis on skills upgrading will allow them to attract more talent.
“Fresh graduates often think that SMEs are family companies and promotion is slower. They’ll ask what career path we can offer,” said Ms Lim. “I hope they’ll understand that they can take ownership of the business too, and can grow (with SMEs).”
Citing the findings of a recent KPMG survey commissioned by the WDA, Ms Julia Ng, the agency’s enterprise development group senior director, said: “SMEs spend less time on strategic HR functions, and spend most of the time fighting fire — doing hiring, payroll. They don’t really spend a lot of time doing talent management, talent development, looking at workforce planning, succession planning, building a skills deepening pathway for the employee.”
Speaking at the launch, Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam said the biggest challenge for the SkillsFuture movement was getting SMEs on board. He added that new approaches were needed, beyond incentives and tripartite collaboration.
Mr Tharman, who also chairs the SkillsFuture Council, said one way would be to create intermediaries between employers and industries that coordinate apprenticeships and conduct training, as done in Switzerland and Sweden even though both countries have a culture of talent development. The council will be studying this further, he said.
Under such a model, employers design the training processes, but the intermediaries connect them with apprentices, jobseekers and government agencies. Through these intermediaries, individuals will have access to a network of high quality and structured apprenticeships.
“The business model of the intermediaries in these countries is to maximise the number of companies who engage in training people, and achieve the right match with people who might want to work in an industry,” said Mr Tharman.
The intermediaries operate using public funding that is allotted based on the number of employers and employees they attract.
