Singapore skills shortage: Firms pay up to 50% more for specialist IT skills
Despite various initiatives by the Singapore government to boost the hiring of local workers, they face a skills shortage in a booming Information Technology (IT) sector with firms looking to pay up to 50% more for expatriates with the specialised skills.
CAPE TOWN, June 10 (ANA) – Despite various initiatives by the Singapore government to boost the hiring of local workers, they face a skills shortage in a booming Information Technology (IT) sector with firms looking to pay up to 50% more for expatriates with the specialised skills.
According to Channel NewsAsia (CNA), a Singapore-based broadcaster, HR recruiting firms say there’s a shortage of specialised IT skills in the country from local and abroad ranging from data analytics to cybersecurity, as tighter border controls due to the Covid-19 pandemic also impacting the skills shortage.
“A technical data professional is everyone from a data scientist to data engineers who understand the differences between different methods of protection and clustering,” Zachary Johnson, Head of Data Science at the Centre of Applied Data Science (CADS) told CNA.
“There are also non-technical data professionals who understand how we collect the data, how we process it, clean it, prepare it and how we most importantly tell people what we found,” he said.
Bloomberg reported in September last year that the Singapore government planned to disburse US$733 million to companies to encourage them to hire locally.
Meanwhile, various other skills including cloud designers and software engineers are in demand with analysts saying that the country would need 10 to 15 percent more tech professionals by the end of 2021.
And, while the pipeline of local talent is only just entering the workplace, Amazon web services estimate that Singapore will need close to 100,000 data scientists and 1.2 million workers in the digital field by 2025.
– African News Agency (ANA); Edited by Naomi Mackay