Speech by Mr Chan Chun Sing, Minister for Education, at the Launch of the Industry-In-Curriculum Framework at Ngee Ann Polytechnic

1.A very good afternoon to all of you. Before I start, let me first congratulate Ngee Ann Polytechnic on your 60th anniversary!

2.For the staff and faculty of Ngee Ann Polytechnic, this would not have been possible without the partnership with our industry partners, of which many of you are here today. I want to thank you for being part of this journey with Ngee Ann Polytechnic.

3.For today's address, I looked up some data. In the last sixty years, how many of you here have an idea of how Ngee Ann Polytechnic's alumni has grown? How many people have gone through the ranks of Ngee Ann Polytechnic? There is a reason why I want to share this with industry partners, and I will come back to this towards the end of my speech.

4.The answer is at least 170,000. That means that if the adult workforce of Singapore is 2.5 million, this is about 7 per cent of the Singaporean workforce here. If you are in the advertising industry, this number should ring a bell. It means that there is a potential market of 170,000 alumni for us to reach out to. I will come back to this very important number.

5.Today, while Ngee Ann Polytechnic takes in more than 4,000 students every year, there are 170,000 alumni out there in Singapore and the world. Today is a very special occasion, because we want to celebrate the partnership between Ngee Ann and our partners present, and also celebrate the partnerships between all our Institutes of Higher Learning with our industry partners.

6.Let me start with two stories. Many of you will know that closing or tightening the academia and industry nexus is very close to my heart. Why have I been pushing for a tighter nexus between academia and industry all these years?

7.There was once I met a businessman, someone who was an entrepreneur in the business sector. He jokingly and perhaps, not quite so jokingly, told me this: Minister, do you know that all your students graduate with a history degree? I was quite shocked and wondered whether he was joking. But I realised he had a serious message.

8.The message was this: how are we equipping our students with the latest industry-relevant knowledge and skills? If it takes us a couple of months to sense-make the latest trends in the industry, it will take us another few months to curate the curriculum, and then another couple of months or a year to train our trainers, and after that, another two to three years to train our students. Then indeed, he has a point. If we do it this way, our students will indeed be graduating with a history degree, especially in a fast-moving world. Since my time in NTUC, until my time in MTI and now in MOE, I am determined to prove him wrong. And I'll come to how I intend to prove him wrong later.

9.The second story is a more recent one. More recently, I met up with some businesspeople. They said: Minister, the students that you are producing for us are not up to speed. They lack the following traits, attributes, characteristics, skills, as a whole. So I said, how about this?

10.Why don't you tell me all the skill sets and attributes that you would like our students, your future workers, to have? So we went through a brainstorming session and we discussed the attributes, characteristics and skill sets that we wanted and developed a list. After we had all the attributes on the whiteboard, I said, why don't both of us sign on the dotted line now? I promise to produce all the students that you need with the skill sets and attributes that you have just mentioned. And you sign and undertake to employ all these students when they are ready in three to five years. How about a deal?

11.On a more serious note, it dawned upon all of us - how do we even know that the industry will still be the same in five years time? Even if the industry is still around, the suite of products might not be the same, and the skillsets required might not be the same.

12.The average lifespan of even the most successful company on the Forbes 500 has shrunk. In the past, it could be 50 years. Now, it is more likely to be 15 years. The pace of change is accelerating. We need to fix two problems: how to make sure our curriculum is current and relevant? How to make sure that we have the speed to market, in order to meet the needs of our industries? If we can do that, our students can start off well, and develop well.

13.The answer is in this hall today. If we can tighten the nexus between frontier industries with academia, we will not need to fear that our students will only learn things that are outdated. Indeed, we will be equipping our students with the latest frontier industry knowledge and practices. If we can tighten the nexus between academia and industry, then we need not fear that we will take a long time to develop the workers necessary for the industries.

14.In Singapore, we do not compete on the basis of our price or our size. But we compete on the basis of our speed of evolution. Whoever can best tighten the academia and industry nexus, will be the winners in a fast-paced world.

15.Today, I want to make three propositions to you. You are here not just to help Ngee Ann Polytechnic. Of course, your partnership will be vital to how Ngee Ann Polytechnic continues to improve its curriculum. Your presence here will also help Ngee Ann to keep our faculty current.

16.The initiative that Ngee Ann Polytechnic is starting, "Wednesdays Without Walls", will see our faculty having time and space to connect with industries. I congratulate Ngee Ann for that. But I will say that that is only a start. I challenge all the polytechnics to do this. It is not about "Wednesdays Without Walls", it is about "Everyday Without Walls".

17.I have asked myself, why is there this artificial divide between our faculty and the industry? In fact, I have a vision that our faculty will flow seamlessly between the institutions and the industry. That is one crucial way for us to make sure that our faculty is current. When our faculty is current, the curriculum will be current, and our students will benefit from the latest frontier practices in the industry.

18.Our faculty can partner the industry, or the industry can come into our institutions and partner us. This is where I will make three propositions to our industry partners today.

19.The polytechnics, and Ngee Ann Polytechnic in particular, will offer you three services in exchange for your partnership.

20.First, when you partner the polytechnics, you are able to evaluate students, inspire students, and you have the first right of refusal, so to speak. How do the students know which companies are most progressive, will inspire them and give them a meaningful career? It is by word of mouth and their own experience. When a student does an internship with a company, it is a process of mutual discovery. You understand the students' capabilities, and the students understand the big, hairy and audacious goals that your companies have. This is how you inspire them.

21.To all the companies here, the first value add we can provide when you partner the polytechnics is this: you have the first draw on the talent pool. In Singapore's tight talent market, this is a crucial competitive advantage.

22.For those who are not in this room, I want them to know this: your competitors in this room have a leg up on you because they have the first right of refusal. So this is my first offer to all industry partners - if you join us, together, we can help chart the careers of our students and you will have the first call to talent.

23.In the competition for talent, the tighter your partnerships with the polytechnics and Institute of Technical Education (ITE), the better your chances to inspire and have the next generation of talent.

24.The second offer: when I was Minister for Trade and Industry, I visited many companies, including many SMEs. And one of the biggest challenges for SMEs is how to embark on product development and research & development, as well as how to innovate. There is an interesting example by a German company, called Innovation as a Service.

25.For every SME, it is hard to have your own lab to do product development research or even market testing. But if you partner our polytechnics and ITE, you will have a chance to do that. Indeed, our polytechnics, in particular Ngee Ann Polytechnic, can provide that service.

26.You can share with us your business challenges. We can brainstorm with you not just on business strategy, but also on product development. Which is why Innovation as a Service is the second offer we can make.

27.The third proposition to all our business partners here: Training as a Service. This is another proposition that our IHLs can offer. In many industries, I can see many entrepreneurs wanting to train, upskill and reskill their workers. But every individual may not be able to articulate the demand for the new skills, what more the aggregation of demand for new skills.

28.But in our polytechnics and ITE, we can help you to articulate, aggregate and supply the training required. Recently, the Singapore National Employees Federation (SNEF) was looking for a place to train their employers and employees. I suggested for them to co-locate with us, and that we could provide Training as a Service for them. It benefits the industry and also benefits us.

29.These are my three value propositions to our industry partners: for you to have the first pick of the talent pool, and for us to provide Innovation as a Service, as well as Training as a Service.

30.I would like to round off my speech from where I started. This is not just about reaching out to the around 4,200 students that Ngee Ann Polytechnic can provide you from every cohort. Never forget the 170,000 alumni out there. With the Ngee Ann Polytechnic network, when you need workers and new skill sets, Ngee Ann can also be the node to help you reach workers in the country. 7 percent of the Singaporean workforce.

31.Ngee Ann Polytechnic, with its wide network of alumni, will also be able to provide you with a valuable channel to engage and connect with a huge customer base and a potential employee base that can constantly refresh their skills.

32.This is also the challenge that I give to all my polytechnics, including Ngee Ann. Their "clientele", if you'd like, is not the 4,000 students that they get from every cohort. Their clientele is the 4,000 students, plus the many thousands of alumni.

33.In Singapore, our biggest challenge in our education and training system is not about producing 40,000 graduates with diplomas and degrees every year. Our challenge is developing these 40,000 graduates to fulfil their potential, but at the same time to reskill and upskill 400,000 of our adult workers every year.

34.Why 400,000? Because our adult workforce is about 2.5 million. On average, an adult spends about five years in a job. Which means that every year, maybe up to 20 per cent will need to be reskilled and upskilled. And that number is 400,000 to 500,000. That is one order of magnitude more than the 40,000 students in every cohort. So, the customer base for Ngee Ann and other polytechnics is large.

35.This is why I firmly believe in the industry-academia nexus. If Singapore can do this better than other countries, we will be as competitive, if not more competitive, than many other countries who perhaps have more people and more resources than us. We will then be able to compete on the speed of evolution of our products and market development.

36.On that note, I thank all of you for your partnership. On behalf of Ngee Ann Polytechnic, we offer you the three services, which we hope you will take up and also share with your competitors. Thank you very much.

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