SINGAPORE: Finance professionals looking for job matching, career development and training advice can now turn to a newly established one-stop centre for help.
Housed within the expanded premises of the Institute of Banking and Finance (IBF), the IBF Careers Connect was launched on Wednesday (Aug 1) with Education Minister Ong Ye Kung as the guest of honour.
AdvertisementIt touts a range of services aimed at helping finance workers cope with the industry’s transformation.
These include one-on-one sessions with career advisors who will help individuals, be it fresh graduates or mid-career professionals, to identify their work interests and skills before mapping out further training needs.
For a start, the centre, located at the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) building, will have three full-time career coaches.
Job matching and placement services will also be available to link up jobseekers with appropriate roles within the financial sector, or in other industries as IBF partners agencies such as Workforce Singapore (WSG).
AdvertisementAdvertisementProfessionals from other sectors who have matching skills can also be placed in the financial sector.
Speaking at the launch, Mr Ong, who is also a MAS board member, said while career centres are not a new concept, the IBF Careers Connect stands out for its focus on the financial industry and convenient location within the Central Business District (CBD).
"It will bring its expertise in skills development and strong industry connections to help individuals affected by change."
Mr Ong added that innovation is a double-edged sword and that if it is well-embraced, it can raise the industry's competitiveness and workforce capabilities, while creating more jobs and improve lives.
"We should expect many waves of change, with each subsequent one building on the momentum of the previous ones. The first wave is in the way current business is conducted and work is carried out, and how workers adjust to the change. And this may well be the most critical phase because it directly affects people’s jobs and livelihoods," he said.
IBF chairman and MAS managing director Ravi Menon said with technology transforming the financial industry, the workforce needs to transform with it.
Moving forward, there will be higher frequency of job changes in an individual's experience in the financial industry hence the industry needs to look at alternative career pathways and placements in an integrated manner, he added.
IBF’s chief executive Ng Nam Sin said the new career centre will boost ongoing efforts to equip finance workers with the right skills by raising the awareness of training opportunities – an area where nearly 80 per cent of respondents surveyed by IBF in June said they were unclear of.
The same survey done with about 1,000 finance professionals also showed that while about half believe in the importance of acquiring new skills, 41 per cent said they do not feel the urgency to do so.
This is slightly worrisome, said Mr Ng.
“It took the personal computer 10 years to reach the mass market and it took the Internet 4 years to reach 50 million users. We think digital technology is going to be more viral and it will hit how we work and how we live much faster,” he told reporters at a briefing ahead of the launch.
“So there’s an urgency for us to reskill and retrain ourselves.”
Thus far, as part of the Government’s transformation roadmap for the industry, IBF has focused on developing and implementing the professional conversion programmes (PCPs). These are aimed at reskilling workers affected by changes in their job roles and help them move into new growth areas.
Several banks in Singapore, such as DBS, UOB and Citibank, have begun implementing the PCPs.
As part of its aim to reskill 2,000 employees over the next three years, Citibank rolled out its PCP for about 400 employees in June. These workers in front office and operations roles will undergo training in areas like design thinking, automation and cybersecurity over the next 12 months.
In March, the bank also got some 1,600 employees to undergo IBF-accredited training in similar areas.
Being the first to launch last October, DBS said it now has nearly two-thirds of its branch tellers having undergone training, with the remaining batch due to do so within the next 12 months.
It has also announced an investment of S$20 million over five years to equip its 26,000 employees with digital skills to prepare them for the future.
Meanwhile, UOB said last November that it would re-skill 900 customer-facing employees over the next 18 months.
“With banks preparing their people for the roles of the future, IBF Career Connect will play an important role in helping to bolster the industry’s training efforts. We look forward to closer collaboration with IBF on more programmes as we build a future-ready workforce to serve our customers,” said UOB's head of group channels and digitalisation Janet Young.
“For example, we will continue to work with IBF as we expand our PCP to enhance our colleagues’ digital skills in areas such as design thinking, customer journey design and data analytics.”
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