JobTech Online Jobs Scan Examines The Skills Required By The Hottest Roles In Each Sector
Singapore’s Ministry of Manpower (MOM) has identified the jobs most demanded by companies in 11 major industries. To provide a glimpse into the specific requirements of these roles, JobTech has extracted the most common skills among these roles from actual job posts in these sectors as well as the number of relevant courses.
According to advance estimates released by the Ministry of Trade and Industry on Jan 2, Manufacturing led growth in the fourth-quarter of 2018, expanding 5.5% on a year-on-year basis. Correspondingly, from MOM’s job vacancy statistics, the Manufacturing sector’s job vacancy rate has been on a slight upward trajectory across 2018 with a higher vacancy rate among the Electronic, Computer & Optical Products subsector. Among the top 3 roles identified by MOM in the manufacturing sector, Maintenance Management, Troubleshooting and Regulatory Compliance are among the most common skills demanded by companies, according to JobTech’s scan of these online jobs. When it comes to training and preparing the workforce in these areas, Maintenance Management, Troubleshooting and Regulatory Compliance has a reasonably sizeable number of courses list online with 760, 280 and 710 respectively. As for other commonly demanded skills such as Preventive Maintenance and Computer Numerical Control (CNC), online courses listed for them are relatively scarcer.
Job vacancy rates from MOM shows that the Information & Communications (ICT) sector has been consistently experiencing one of the highest vacancy rates. High vacancy rates in the ICT sector has been a longstanding issue that policy makers have been grappling with. Statistics from MOM shows that since 2014, vacancy rates in the sector has been consistently above 3.5% and it has since widened to more than 4.5% in the first three quarters of 2018.
Part of this problem is a skills gap between workers and job requirements, and training programs are essential to reduce this. Below are some of the training providers who provides courses teaching skills shown in the table above ranked by the number of relevant courses offered:
To prepare workers for work in the ICT sector, training in different programming languages and tools has to be conducted in conjunction to better prepare workers in the sector. For instance, close to 20% of Software, Web & Multimedia Developer jobs look out for skills in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and its related libraries within the same job post and thus, it would be beneficial for them to be learned together for effective web programming. In this case, a granular view of the specific co-occurring skills among ICT roles would give greater insights into the training requirements of the ICT sector. The same applies for courses as they should be analysed and adjusted accordingly to the combination of skills required.
