Back
Commemorating ten years of the SkillsFuture movement in May 2025, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong highlighted that Singapore is at the global forefront of attempting to nurture and embed a national culture of lifelong learning and continuous growth. The engine of this effort is described as a "complex ecosystem" of "institutions, partners and stakeholders". PM Wong emphasised that this drive is not the purview of any one ministry, but is instead a whole-of-society, national movement.
In business and innovation studies, an ecosystem refers to a set of interdependent actors (firms, users, institutions, intermediaries) whose interactions and resource flows co-create value beyond what any single actor could produce alone. Players benefit from sharing capabilities and complementarities, from innovation through collaboration, and from a greater range and depth of learning and policy influences.
Singapore's Continuing Education and Training (CET) ecosystem comprises government agencies, Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs), private training providers, adult educators and trainers, employers, trade associations, labour movement and learners.
While the vision of a national skills ecosystem forging ahead as one is persuasive, it is less clear whether all the key players today recognise and embrace the roles they need to play for this approach to yield meaningful outcomes for all. We have room to do better at harnessing and deepening our ecosystem advantages.
Not Just coordination but collaboration
To better nurture the ecosystem, we may have to ask ourselves how we can both coordinate and collaborate more efficiently across the CET landscape. To date, the government has been the overall lead and primary coordinator of the movement. They have done well by co-opting and marshalling the other ecosystem players through inventive, relevant and generous schemes and policies.
However, it is not yet a fully level playing field. For instance, only about 7% of the 354,000 SMEs that account for the bulk of enterprises in Singapore have sent their workers for SkillsFuture-supported programmes. Inroads with SMEs have been made, such as with its SkillsFuture Queen Bee initiative of a community of enterprises supporting one another. Many SMEs do also incorporate workplace learning programmes and in-house initiatives for their workforce. But more can be done to bring employers on board.
For instance, could the SkillsFuture Queen Bee model be organically replicated if a public agency — such as Enterprise Singapore — were to serve as an ecosystem coordinator, driving synergies across sectors and enterprises?When there is conscious coordination across a sector, all players could come together to assess its skills stock and levels, build towards thoughtful job designs and allow for more workers to use and grow complex skills to benefit the entire sector. SMEs, in particular, could benefit from such arrangements as they are buoyed by the sector coming together rather than an anointed queen bee who focuses only on their immediate supply chain partners.
Information flow for SkillsFuture messaging could also be enhanced to better reach and persuade a wider and more inclusive spread of employers and enterprises.
Behaviour in an ecosystem, and ultimately its long-term health, hinges on the rules of engagement and the nature of standards and interfaces — open versus closed; imposed versus emergent. This is where there is a meaningful difference between coordination and collaboration.
We are adept at coordinating large segments of the skills ecosystem to work together in an organised way. But we do not yet see many instances of deep collaboration, where different players work organically together to achieve something more than they otherwise could by themselves.
What if the IHLs, private sector training providers and corporate training entities, as well as their cadre of trainers and educators, were to come together to create better quality learning? Today, , with competition between leading learning providers being the norm, they have few opportunities to overlap or meet, resulting in collaboration becoming a rare occurrence. How might we create conditions where they could collaborate for mutual benefit, as well as for the good of the ecosystem as a whole?
One instance where we do see a more holistic collaborative effort is in the recent push for Career Health, which has reached out simultaneously to employers, enterprises and individuals. The initiative was spearheaded by the lead public agencies, SkillsFuture Singapore and Workforce Singapore, with other key players such as the Institute for Human Resource Professionals and the Employability and Employment Institute.
This is not to say greater public sector intervention is the only way to go. Instead, we need to find further ways for all players, especially those from the broader private sector, to be more meaningfully engaged and included in sector and ecosystem developments. When the ground is more level, the likelihood of collaboration, where the aspiration is for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts, can be fulfilled.
Another important group of stakeholders to consider is the learners: the purpose for the ecosystem's existence in the first place. From the start, the SkillsFuture movement has placed significant emphasis on easing access to learning and growth opportunities. There has been promising growth in learner participation: in 2024 alone, 555,000 individuals took on SkillsFuture-supported programmes, a 6% increase from the previous year.
Nevertheless, there may be segments of learners who have yet to come on board. They may include gig workers and freelancers who lack industry or organisational support to guide them to appropriate learning activities and provisions. A sizeable proportion of Singaporean adults may also lack the basic literacy, numeracy and adaptive skills to keep up with the current or future demands of a rapidly changing marketplace — they may be unable, rather than unwilling, to skill up enough. Addressing such gaps — together with the learners themselves — would be vital to strengthening the CET ecosystem.
Three strategies for a healthier CET ecosystem
Activating Singapore's skills ecosystem more effectively, through both coordination and collaboration efforts, remains a challenging task. Yet, it is vital to achieve the movement's broader outcomes. This may involve a number of strategies going forward:
1. Recognise the diversity, scale and spread of the CET ecosystem
The more ready we are to leverage the organic opportunities this multi-faceted ecosystem, with its many complementarities, bring us, the better we can ensure value capture for the ecosystem, its players and the workforce who are the beneficiaries. To do so, we must be deliberately more inclusive and consultative, reaching beyond our comfort zones. We must clarify connections between learning, work and progress. And we must embrace the understanding that everyone has to contribute to the ecosystem in order to achieve more together through intentional collaboration and the integration of resources, efforts and initiatives.
2. Ensure that players fully understand their relative roles and value in the ecosystem
This involves both multi-party communication approaches and targeted outreach to particular branches of the ecosystem to fully prepare them to play their roles. For example, we may want to engage IHLs and private sector training providers together, so that each can independently do what they do best, while collectively doing better by understanding one another’s efforts. The ecosystem must be kept informed about the different key nodes of the SkillsFuture web of activities and each player's role in it: from the groups who will function as first responders in skills gap recognition and delivery, to those who will ensure that the skills are meaningfully deployed in the workplace where they are needed. The ecosystem can then work out how best to engender more organic ecosystem autonomy towards mutual benefits and shared goals.
3. Lead by focusing on each player group while also holding the rest of the ecosystem in mind
Complementarities can be best exploited if this dual attention is paid both to the specific players involved and to the ecosystem as a whole. Enterprises may be the right target for initiatives that leverage learning in the flow of work, but because they are such a diverse group, it may help to heighten their awareness of prevailing trends and the broader ecosystem.
How then do we acknowledge the complex intermesh of ecosystem players who range from the large to the small, from enterprises to providers and from educators to learners? We may need to engage with each ecosystem player group at a deeper level, through deliberate user profiling for example, to capture each user group's particular needs. With such data and understandings, strategic plan-making across the whole ecosystem could then be nuanced and communicated via ecosystem-wide narratives. Complexity is then welcomed and embraced: rather than dodged or deconstructed for the ease of managing each group separately, which could lead to silos that defeat ecosystem benefits.
Conclusion
The CET ecosystem built up and cultivated over the last decade and more, has reached a certain level of maturity and value that is yielding benefits for Singapore.
Public service agencies could better steward the CET ecosystem by honing their coordination and collaboration efforts across the various agencies and ministries. This would entail each agency going beyond its particular mission to converge on the larger CET ecosystem vision for Singapore. There would also need to be nimbleness and agility within such efforts to take on emergent situations should economic headwinds and turbulence dictate the need for rapid pivoting. With deep understanding and nurturing of the ecosystem and more organic and inclusive approaches in place, the CET ecosystem across the next decade could reap even more benefits for Singapore.
In business and innovation studies, an ecosystem refers to a set of interdependent actors (firms, users, institutions, intermediaries) whose interactions and resource flows co-create value beyond what any single actor could produce alone. Players benefit from sharing capabilities and complementarities, from innovation through collaboration, and from a greater range and depth of learning and policy influences.
Singapore's Continuing Education and Training (CET) ecosystem comprises government agencies, Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs), private training providers, adult educators and trainers, employers, trade associations, labour movement and learners.
While the vision of a national skills ecosystem forging ahead as one is persuasive, it is less clear whether all the key players today recognise and embrace the roles they need to play for this approach to yield meaningful outcomes for all. We have room to do better at harnessing and deepening our ecosystem advantages.
Not Just coordination but collaboration
To better nurture the ecosystem, we may have to ask ourselves how we can both coordinate and collaborate more efficiently across the CET landscape. To date, the government has been the overall lead and primary coordinator of the movement. They have done well by co-opting and marshalling the other ecosystem players through inventive, relevant and generous schemes and policies.
However, it is not yet a fully level playing field. For instance, only about 7% of the 354,000 SMEs that account for the bulk of enterprises in Singapore have sent their workers for SkillsFuture-supported programmes. Inroads with SMEs have been made, such as with its SkillsFuture Queen Bee initiative of a community of enterprises supporting one another. Many SMEs do also incorporate workplace learning programmes and in-house initiatives for their workforce. But more can be done to bring employers on board.
For instance, could the SkillsFuture Queen Bee model be organically replicated if a public agency — such as Enterprise Singapore — were to serve as an ecosystem coordinator, driving synergies across sectors and enterprises?When there is conscious coordination across a sector, all players could come together to assess its skills stock and levels, build towards thoughtful job designs and allow for more workers to use and grow complex skills to benefit the entire sector. SMEs, in particular, could benefit from such arrangements as they are buoyed by the sector coming together rather than an anointed queen bee who focuses only on their immediate supply chain partners.
Information flow for SkillsFuture messaging could also be enhanced to better reach and persuade a wider and more inclusive spread of employers and enterprises.
Behaviour in an ecosystem, and ultimately its long-term health, hinges on the rules of engagement and the nature of standards and interfaces — open versus closed; imposed versus emergent. This is where there is a meaningful difference between coordination and collaboration.
We are adept at coordinating large segments of the skills ecosystem to work together in an organised way. But we do not yet see many instances of deep collaboration, where different players work organically together to achieve something more than they otherwise could by themselves.
What if the IHLs, private sector training providers and corporate training entities, as well as their cadre of trainers and educators, were to come together to create better quality learning? Today, , with competition between leading learning providers being the norm, they have few opportunities to overlap or meet, resulting in collaboration becoming a rare occurrence. How might we create conditions where they could collaborate for mutual benefit, as well as for the good of the ecosystem as a whole?
One instance where we do see a more holistic collaborative effort is in the recent push for Career Health, which has reached out simultaneously to employers, enterprises and individuals. The initiative was spearheaded by the lead public agencies, SkillsFuture Singapore and Workforce Singapore, with other key players such as the Institute for Human Resource Professionals and the Employability and Employment Institute.
This is not to say greater public sector intervention is the only way to go. Instead, we need to find further ways for all players, especially those from the broader private sector, to be more meaningfully engaged and included in sector and ecosystem developments. When the ground is more level, the likelihood of collaboration, where the aspiration is for the whole to be greater than the sum of its parts, can be fulfilled.
Another important group of stakeholders to consider is the learners: the purpose for the ecosystem's existence in the first place. From the start, the SkillsFuture movement has placed significant emphasis on easing access to learning and growth opportunities. There has been promising growth in learner participation: in 2024 alone, 555,000 individuals took on SkillsFuture-supported programmes, a 6% increase from the previous year.
Nevertheless, there may be segments of learners who have yet to come on board. They may include gig workers and freelancers who lack industry or organisational support to guide them to appropriate learning activities and provisions. A sizeable proportion of Singaporean adults may also lack the basic literacy, numeracy and adaptive skills to keep up with the current or future demands of a rapidly changing marketplace — they may be unable, rather than unwilling, to skill up enough. Addressing such gaps — together with the learners themselves — would be vital to strengthening the CET ecosystem.
Three strategies for a healthier CET ecosystem
Activating Singapore's skills ecosystem more effectively, through both coordination and collaboration efforts, remains a challenging task. Yet, it is vital to achieve the movement's broader outcomes. This may involve a number of strategies going forward:
1. Recognise the diversity, scale and spread of the CET ecosystem
The more ready we are to leverage the organic opportunities this multi-faceted ecosystem, with its many complementarities, bring us, the better we can ensure value capture for the ecosystem, its players and the workforce who are the beneficiaries. To do so, we must be deliberately more inclusive and consultative, reaching beyond our comfort zones. We must clarify connections between learning, work and progress. And we must embrace the understanding that everyone has to contribute to the ecosystem in order to achieve more together through intentional collaboration and the integration of resources, efforts and initiatives.
2. Ensure that players fully understand their relative roles and value in the ecosystem
This involves both multi-party communication approaches and targeted outreach to particular branches of the ecosystem to fully prepare them to play their roles. For example, we may want to engage IHLs and private sector training providers together, so that each can independently do what they do best, while collectively doing better by understanding one another’s efforts. The ecosystem must be kept informed about the different key nodes of the SkillsFuture web of activities and each player's role in it: from the groups who will function as first responders in skills gap recognition and delivery, to those who will ensure that the skills are meaningfully deployed in the workplace where they are needed. The ecosystem can then work out how best to engender more organic ecosystem autonomy towards mutual benefits and shared goals.
3. Lead by focusing on each player group while also holding the rest of the ecosystem in mind
Complementarities can be best exploited if this dual attention is paid both to the specific players involved and to the ecosystem as a whole. Enterprises may be the right target for initiatives that leverage learning in the flow of work, but because they are such a diverse group, it may help to heighten their awareness of prevailing trends and the broader ecosystem.
How then do we acknowledge the complex intermesh of ecosystem players who range from the large to the small, from enterprises to providers and from educators to learners? We may need to engage with each ecosystem player group at a deeper level, through deliberate user profiling for example, to capture each user group's particular needs. With such data and understandings, strategic plan-making across the whole ecosystem could then be nuanced and communicated via ecosystem-wide narratives. Complexity is then welcomed and embraced: rather than dodged or deconstructed for the ease of managing each group separately, which could lead to silos that defeat ecosystem benefits.
Conclusion
The CET ecosystem built up and cultivated over the last decade and more, has reached a certain level of maturity and value that is yielding benefits for Singapore.
Public service agencies could better steward the CET ecosystem by honing their coordination and collaboration efforts across the various agencies and ministries. This would entail each agency going beyond its particular mission to converge on the larger CET ecosystem vision for Singapore. There would also need to be nimbleness and agility within such efforts to take on emergent situations should economic headwinds and turbulence dictate the need for rapid pivoting. With deep understanding and nurturing of the ecosystem and more organic and inclusive approaches in place, the CET ecosystem across the next decade could reap even more benefits for Singapore.
This article is an abridged version of the original contribution by Associate Professor Renee Tan, Assistant Executive Director and Research Division Director at the Institute for Adult Learning (IAL). The full article was first published in ETHOS, a Civil Service College publication.
At IAL, our Adult Learning Collaboratory (ALC), supported by SkillsFuture Singapore, adopts an ecosystem approach, where stakeholders, comprising enterprises, researchers, training providers, learners, adult education professionals and more, come together to undertake use-driven co-creation. Through collaborations, partners work together to reap benefits for all through collective innovation to address complex challenges in adult learning, drawing on insights from IAL's research. Click here to learn more about ALC’s work.
At IAL, our Adult Learning Collaboratory (ALC), supported by SkillsFuture Singapore, adopts an ecosystem approach, where stakeholders, comprising enterprises, researchers, training providers, learners, adult education professionals and more, come together to undertake use-driven co-creation. Through collaborations, partners work together to reap benefits for all through collective innovation to address complex challenges in adult learning, drawing on insights from IAL's research. Click here to learn more about ALC’s work.