White Paper

The SkillsFuture movement is aimed at enabling all Singaporeans to develop the skills relevant to the future. It will engage every segment of our workforce, including university, polytechnic and Institute of Technical Education graduates. We agree that individuals should not be measured on academic qualifications alone. These qualifications are not irrelevant — they reflect determination and an ability to learn in one’s youth. But we must look beyond early qualifications and recognise that a whole set of skills matters in how well we do and what we contribute.

The SkillsFuture Council, chaired by Deputy Prime Minister (DPM) Tharman Shanmugaratnam, held its first meeting today. The Council will develop an integrated system of education, training and career progression for all Singaporeans, promote industry support for individuals to advance based on skills, and foster a culture of lifelong learning. The formation of the Council was announced by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong at this year’s National Day Rally.

The Quebec labor market is now in an enviable position. It tends towards full employment, with an unemployment rate that has never been lower. This phenomenon, which affects many regions of Quebec, is due to a good performance in creating jobs as well as to decrease the size of the elderly population of 15 to 64 years that began in 2014. This full employment will be extended over time as more than 1.4 million jobs will be vacant in Quebec over the period 2017-2026.  This performance of the labor market is good news because it offers great opportunities to all those who wish to participate in with jobs that match their skills and aspirations. In turn, this leads to labor scarcity phenomenon for employers.  The government is actively working to manage issues related to the new realities of the labor market, especially for Quebec has a sufficient number of workers and skilled workers. It is in this spirit that Emploi-Québec, in collaboration with the regional offices of Services Québec, generates employment forecasts by industry and occupation for each administrative region. The lists on the status of quantitative balance of work by short-term market occupation (2018) and medium term (2021) fall within the framework of concrete actions the government is taking to improve knowledge of current and future needs of the labor market and find courses of action to reduce labor imbalances.  With this publication, Emploi-Québec informs the various stakeholders of the labor market to support them in making informed decisions, thereby contributing to the formation adéqation-compétencesemploi. The document is divided into two sections: the first presents the main employment forecasts for the entire labor market for certain groups of professions, and the second shows the diagnostics related to occupation labor needs and region. [googletranslate_en]

This report provides a qualitative understanding of the benefits of training levies and their impacts in order to better understand how levies affect employer behaviour. To achieve this, the research sets out the following objectives at a high level: • What does an effective training levy system look like? • What is the impact of the current levy systems? • What lessons can be learned in order to encourage employers to participate in levy type systems more widely? What features are most attractive/persuasive to employers? These objectives have been pursued through a combination of desk research and a small number of interviews with levy operators, employers and stakeholders. The research provides indicative findings to further develop our understanding about employer attitudes and opinions on these issues.

This report seeks to identify today's innovations that could lead to new kinds of job opportunities for youth under four alternative scenarios. The goal is to identify key leverage points to work with organizations, corporations, and other large employers in building future jobs for the young people, starting today. The report uses the alternative scenarios methodology developed at the University of Hawaii to envision four archetypal futures: (1) growth - the flexing economy, where increasing competition and automation force workers to continuously upgrade skills or risk losing out on opportunities; (2) collapse - the growing gap, where increasing automation reducing the number of both low- and high-skill jobs is grossly mishandled and results in a deep social and economic divide; (3) constraint - oDesk inside, where highly networked and internally coordinated firms become efficient economic forces and major employers of coordinated workforces; and (4) transformation - the amplified individual, where technologies only available to large organizations now empower employees to splinter off and create single-person companies and ventures.

This paper raises basic questions about the process of economic growth. It questions the assumption, nearly universal since Solow's seminal contributions of the 1950s, that economic growth is a continuous process that will persist forever. There was virtually no growth before 1750, and thus there is no guarantee that growth will continue indefinitely. Rather, the paper suggests that the rapid progress made over the past 250 years could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history. The paper is only about the United States and views the future from 2007 while pretending that the financial crisis did not happen. Its point of departure is growth in per-capita real GDP in the frontier country since 1300, the U.K. until 1906 and the U.S. afterwards. Growth in this frontier gradually accelerated after 1750, reached a peak in the middle of the 20th century, and has been slowing down since. The paper is about "how much further could the frontier growth rate decline?"

This paper shows that high-tech employment – broadly defined as all workers in high-tech sectors but also workers with STEM degrees in low-tech sectors – has increased in Europe over the past decade. Moreover, we estimate that every high-tech job in a region creates five additional low-tech jobs in that region because of the existence of a local high-tech job multiplier. The paper also shows how the presence of a local high-tech job multiplier results in convergence is happening at a glacial pace, and some suggestive evidence is presented that lifting several institutional barriers to innovation in Europe’s lagging regions would speed up convergence leading to faster high-tech as well as overall employment while also addressing Europe’s regional inequalities.

This paper presents an overview of some of the recent literature about the long-run changes in labour market outcomes in advanced economies. It shows that the First and Second Industrial Revolutions, with inventions in the second half of the 19th century that had a lasting impact up to 1980, resulted in skill upgrading and decreasing overall wage inequality. To the contrary, the Computer Revolution that started in the 1980s is no longer unambiguously skill-upgrading but characterized by an underlying process of job polarization and an increase in upper-tail and overall wage inequality. However, the paper concludes by providing arguments in favour of optimism about future computerization as long as our labour markets are able to provide the necessary worker skills to support such changes.

In April 2010, the UK Commission took over strategic ownership of the Investors in People (IIP) Standard. This evidence review draws on a wide range of research from the last 10 years to develop a deeper understanding of how IIP is perceived and to provide evidence of the impact of the Standard on the businesses which are accredited. The review provides the UK Commission with a consistent narrative on IIP to date. Over the past twenty years Investors in People has become an enduring feature of the UK skills policy landscape, as a training tool and as a business development tool for organisations. There is evidence of a continuing concentration of accreditations among larger organisations and employers in the public sector. The review identifies many reasons why employers engage with IIP. These differences in motivation are likely to influence the impact of IIP on organisations, which are commonly measured in the literature as relating to training levels, operational performance and business outcomes. There is a mixed understanding among employers and stakeholders as to whether IIP is a training tool, a business development tool, or both. The report raises interesting questions about the future objectives of IIP in encouraging more employers to invest in workforce capability.