Our Research

This project aims to investigate the demand side of the skills market in Singapore by surveying commercial establishments on their business strategies, skills utilisation and performance. Understanding the links between strategy, skills and performance will aid Singaporean policy makers in building an effective skills strategy for the future. Importantly, as the second wave of the Business, Performance and Skills Survey, this study will provide a sense of the changing landscape in Singapore regarding skills utilisation and the demand for skills.

This is a mixed methods study conducted from September 2020 to February 2021. It aims to investigate Singapore adult learners’ experiences with transitioning to full online learning as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Enhancing Course Quality and Curriculum project was initiated with the objective of improving the quality of CET courses based on research findings centred on the impact of the Six Principles of Learning Design (PoLD) on learning effectiveness (Bound & Chia, 2020). Lasting over a year, the project comprised several activities spanning 2 stages (Trial 1: documentary review of Course Proposals (CPs) for evidence of design principles, online survey on perceptions of CET practitioners and Training Providers (TPs) to PoLD in course design, and Trial 2: coaching 17 TPs through the process of populating the new PoLD-infused Course Proposal, conducting focus group discussions with SSG auditors and TPs not involved in the coaching trial).

The project provides a consensus assessment of the skills that are likely to be highly impacted by automation technologies within the next five years and the nature of that impact.

Innovative learning culture in SMEs; research study aims to understand how SMEs afford learning opportunities that promote innovation, and how learning of innovative practices might best proceed in these organisations. The research questions of this project will be addressed through intensive qualitative case studies to provide novel insights of innovative learning cultures in SMEs in Singapore.

This multi-phase project investigates the landscape of the training and adult education (TAE) sector in Singapore. It aims to provide baseline information about the current population and state of the TAE sector, including the profiles, practices, beliefs and challenges of TAE professionals and providers, as well as the impact of government policies and initiatives on their TAE practices and development. A set of indicators will be developed as an initial effort to evaluate the current status of TAE sector. These indicators could be refined and evolved over time for regular tracking of the changes to the TAE sector and the survey can be repeated every 2-3 years.

Observations of talent shortage at the higher end of Singapore’s labour market often lead to the assumption that there are particular skill gaps or ‘talent deficit’ in locals. This comparative research on talent management in 30 corporations in Singapore, China and India puts forth an alternative explanation. Rather than any actual ‘talent deficit’ of Singaporeans, the study found that the perceived talent shortage is linked to companies’ ‘War for Talent’ recruitment strategies that rely on elite university systems. Singapore’s fairly flat university system does not signal to companies the elite base that companies can target, leading to Singapore graduates not being favourably positioned as talent in companies. India and China, on the other hand, have a small pool of elite universities that companies can target easily using their ‘War for Talent’ strategies, creating the pipeline of sponsored talent on a trajectory to top jobs. Moreover, local knowledge commands a significant premium in India and China, in contrast to Singapore’s plug-and-play business environment. An expedient but short-sighted response to a ‘War for Talent’ corporate talent strategy is to shift the university system in Singapore towards higher levels of elitism, as is the case with the university systems in India and China. However, this flies in the face of creating a more inclusive society and shared economic prosperity that sit at the heart of SkillsFuture. A sustainable way forward for Singapore is to give due focus to transformational strategies that shift the local corporate landscape towards more inclusive talent approaches. There is now an excellent window of opportunity to do so, as rapidly changing contexts have undermined the efficacy of ‘War for Talent’ strategies.

To compete in the knowledge economy of the 21st century, organizations need to innovate and develop new capabilities to harness values of knowledge resources (Carlucci, 2014). Consequently, education of the workforce must adapt to the new business environments in the knowledge economy. In Singapore, the key goals suggested by the Committee on the Future Economy (2017) include the need for workers to develop and apply deep skills and strengthening enterprise abilities to innovate and scale up innovative practices. It is thus imperative to identify and improve adult learning approaches that can enhance the capacity of our workers to be innovative and productive knowledge workers. A promising approach is dialogic teaching, which refers to “a pedagogical approach that involves students in the collaborative construction of meaning and is characterized by shared control over the key aspects of classroom discourse.” (Reznitskaya & Gregory, 2013, p. 114) It gives learners agency and control over their learning processes and topics for inquiry, and more critically, engages them in collaborative meaning making and tapping into their rich experiences as resources for learning. Dialogical inquiry, knowledge building and co-construction, all aspects of this study, are important future readiness capabilities. Yet, research on a dialogic approach to adult learning is limited, internationally and locally. This qualitative project collects a rich range of data from two courses in two different Masters programs conducted at NIE, NTU to address the following research questions: i. How do adult learners in formal graduate courses 1 develop awareness of their inquiry and how do they co-construct knowledge? ii. How do adult learners perceive the relevance and effectiveness of dialogical approach to teaching and learning? iii. What are the implications of the dialogical approach for the practices of adult educators?

The project investigates Singapore adult learners’ learning experiences in blended learning environments focusing on how they ‘experience’ and ‘made sense of’ their learning in and across blended environments and the implications of these processes for pedagogical practices and beliefs. Sense-making is the process by which people give meaning to experience. Such processes contribute to knowledge building, construction and co-construction of knowledge. Besides, the structuring or architecture of different environments can facilitate reflection, and collaboration or can shut it down. Such an understanding of the spaces of learning not only potentially enables us to understand how learners sense make and embody practices, but also their interaction with the spaces in their journey of transformation of understanding, identity and agency.