Singapore is offering career conversion programs to tourism and lifestyle industries, which bore the brunt of the Covid-19 pandemic. The programs inculcate digital and technical training and have been built to prepare employees to grab new job opportunities.

The career conversion programs were launched in 2019 to accelerate digitization plans. It started by enrolling 200 companies; 40 workers and presently caters to 3100 workers with approximately 200 companies. The career enhancement initiative is reported to aid 1400 additional employees by the end of 2022. At present, there are 23 courses designed to assist employees in the tourism and lifestyle industry.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the working style of businesses and companies worldwide has completely changed. It includes hosting hybrid and virtual events, virtual meetings, online tours to travel destinations, etc. Companies, therefore, are re-shaping job profiles to support digital transformations.

Consequently, the tourism and lifestyle industry, to cope with digitization is relying on reskilling, upskilling of the workforce.

Speaking on the need for conversion courses, Manpower Minister Tan See Leng stated, “With companies preparing themselves for the eventual recovery of the sector, we expect demand for these career conversion programs to remain strong”. With the digitization of the tourism and lifestyle industry, it is crucial to train workers with relevant skills to further cope up with e-commerce, data analytics, and digital sales and marketing added the Ministry of Manpower and Workforce Singapore.

To host and serve efficient manpower and enhanced productivity, more than 60 businesses have managed to transform their work models and job roles with the help of the Service Industry Transformation Programme.

Commenting on the gravity of the situation, Jeannie Lim, assistant chief executive of the policy and planning group at STB mentioned, training employees with relevant skills and re-shaping or transformation of business models should be the prime focus to cope up with the evolving times. Apart from service industry transformation courses to formulate work models and job profiles, funds, and loans are being offered by the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) and Enterprise Singapore to ramp up business growth.