Singapore career news: Jobs coming back to Singapore but only in selective areas: surveys

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Jobs coming back to Singapore but only in selective areas: surveys
By Michael Lim, Channel NewsAsia

SINGAPORE : The Inland Revenue and PowerSeraya may be retrenching, and earlier this week ANA Hotel announced it was letting go all 200 staff. But it is not all bad news.

Some firms are hiring.

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Chip tester ST Assembly, for instance, is looking to hire over 1,000 people. So too is Deloitte Touche.

But current recruitment is selective.

One company that is raising its head count here is Agilent Technologies.

The company specialises in providing solutions and services to the communications, electronics, life sciences and chemical analysis industries.

In fact, Agilent Technologies is hoping to up its staff count by almost 350 by the end of the year.

"Right now what we are seeing is really a pickup and a recovery in the semiconductor, in the semiconductor testing business. So we are hiring mainly for these two businesses," said Ow Seng Fong, human resource functions manager at Agilent.

Despite the upbeat outlook on both the global and local economies as well as from companies like Agilent Technologies, some human resources experts remain sceptical about the possibility of jobs coming back in a big way.

"Our survey data showed that as a whole out of 210 participants in a recent survey that we did, only 6 percent of them said they were actually ready to hire over the next 6 months," said Lim Kian Kok, principal consultant at Mercer Human Resource Consulting.

"When we did the same survey last September the number was 4 percent. So if we said there are jobs coming back in a big way I am not so sure it's as big as what is said. But I think the answer is more in specific sectors than anything else."

A survey conducted by Singapore Human Resources Institute shows organisations and businesses are optimistic in hiring more people over the next 6 months to a year.

The data lists aviation, electronics, chemical and pharmaceutical industries as the most likely areas where the workforce will see an expansion.

But there is a catch. If you look closely, most, if not all, these new production type jobs require a degree of technical expertise.

In other words, they are not the old labour intensive production operators jobs.

"The production assembly plant, the production manager and the quality production manager as we are used to in the mass productions environment are no more. All these plants have been relocated," David Ang, executive director of the Singapore Human Resources Institute, said.

"Today's situation in the factory that we have today, you need a higher education minimum a diploma or at least an ITE technician qualification," he said.

And there is less to cheer about.

Executives and middle management executives who are in pain, could remain in pain.

That is because companies are able to outsource some of these jobs to lower cost economies like India, China and the Philippines. - CNA