As another New Year is upon us and we get ready to move towards creating a newer feature amidst even more uncertain times, two words sum up the most important needs for today’s workforce-resilient and future ready. Organizations the world over are fretting over to equip their workforce with critical and emerging skills that are in demand. 

Recently, in this very direction, Oracle and SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG) entered into a collaboration in November to support for the national SkillsFuture movement in Singapore. The collaboration aims to enable HR professionals, employers and employees to quickly and easily access the Skills Frameworks and facilitate learning and development for the organization.

In an exclusive interaction with People Matters, Serene Sia, MD of Oracle Singapore sheds light on the collaboration with SkillsFuture and the future readiness of employees and employers in Singapore.

What will the collaboration with SkillsFuture seek to achieve and how will it empower HR professionals, employers, and employees? How exactly will Oracle work with SSG to embed the Skills Frameworks in Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud?

The collaboration with SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG) seeks to support the national SkillsFuture movement, helping organizations equip their workforce with critical and emerging skills that are in demand. Oracle will work with SSG to embed the Skills Frameworks in the Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud, allowing HR professionals, employers and employees to quickly and easily access the Skills Frameworks. This provides them with a common skills language that helps in recruitment processes, talent management, and facilitating learning and development for the organization. Employers and employees of enterprises who use Oracle HCM Cloud would be able to directly access the Skills Framework from their HCM interface.

How will the collaboration aid SSG and support the national SkillsFuture movement in Singapore? What do you think will be its impact on Singapore’s talent economy?

Oracle HCM Cloud enables HR professionals to meet the increasing expectations of an ever-changing workforce and business environment by providing a complete and powerful platform that spans the entire employee life cycle. The embedding of the Skills Framework into Oracle HCM Cloud seeks to provide organizations with a common skills language that helps in recruitment processes, talent management, and facilitating learning and development for their organizations. This supports the SkillsFuture movement by helping organizations equip their workforce with critical and emerging skills that are in demand. 

Oracle will also expand its Continuing Education and Training (CET) offerings through intermediaries such as Institutes of Higher Learning and CET centers, to help build the talent pipeline for the workforce of tomorrow.

Making the workforce future ready is a big concern for organizations today. How will the collaboration help companies in that direction?

The rapidly changing demands of today’s talent economy are challenging companies to rethink established processes and constantly innovate and adapt in order to take a holistic view towards how they build the workforce of the future. By continuing to integrate the latest in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning within Oracle HCM Cloud, Oracle is helping our customers simplify the complex and deliver the best possible employee experience. 

What as per is you the state of future readiness of employees and employers in Singapore?

We are very excited to be embarking on this journey with SkillsFuture Singapore and eager to support the government in the national movement for lifelong learning.

The Singapore government has been very focused on skills development – ensuring no one gets left behind – even as we push for progress.

 As a technology provider of transformational technology, we are eager to share with organizations how technology can be a catalyst to make work simpler, faster and more effective, as well as aid in the efforts to bridge any gaps in skills upgrading.   

What do you think is going to be the effect of transformational technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning on Singapore’s workforce?

At the recent Oracle Open World event in San Francisco, co-CEO of Oracle, Mark Hurd shared that, in his opinion, 60 percent of all IT jobs have not been invented yet – but will be created within the next seven years.

With businesses embracing transformational technology, new careers fueled by the use of AI and other emerging technologies will be created. These can include supervisors for robots, smart city technology designers, AI-assisted healthcare technicians, and data professionals – most of whom were not available 10 years ago. 

Oracle believes that technology is a catalyst to make work more human, by automating labour-intensive manual processes. Change is also hard to predict, and transformational technologies like AI and machine learning can better chart the way forward, assisting in identifying what skills are needed now and for the future. 

How ready are companies in Singapore to employ transformational technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in identifying what skills are needed now and for the future?

The Singapore government is leading the way when it comes to employing transformational technologies like AI and machine learning. As PM Lee mentioned in a Singapore University of Technology and Design Ministerial Forum, AI is going to progress developments around the world – not necessarily to take away jobs, but to be leveraged to make a job easier or less manually intensive to accomplish. 

While companies in Singapore may be at varying degrees of adoption levels for AI and machine learning, Oracle is taking a different approach towards the delivery of emerging technologies such as AI, machine learning, industrial internet, and blockchain. Rather than ask customers to adopt new technologies, Oracle has integrated these functions into our apps, including our HCM Cloud, so customers can get business value for certain use cases right away. 

What do you think are the 2-3 key things organizations should focus on the most to develop talent to be future ready?

Change is the only constant. The constantly changing expectations of candidates and employees are one of the biggest challenges organizations face today and is resulting in escalating recruitment costs and increasing employee turnover. Expectations will continue to change faster than most organizations are able to evolve or invent experiences for and this constant flux requires organizations to constantly innovate and adapt. 

One thing that organizations should work on is helping their employees cope with change.

Many businesses are transforming themselves – these changes while adequately communicated to employees, may not take into account how to enable employees across the organization to feel comfortable with change. While making training available is par for course, organizations need to do more with regards to helping team leaders and managers have conversations with their employees. It needs to support these leaders and managers to be real coaches and mentors, such that employees are equipped to be successful.

Another thing is to not be a practitioner of ‘analysis paralysis’.

While technology is useful in collating and making sense of data – people can procrastinate as a result of having too much data. Many struggle with making decisions because they have so much information at their hands that they get bamboozled by it. They stop short of making a decision because they keep hoping that the next bit of analysis will give them a solution. But solutions do not just appear and hit people in the head, unfortunately. Ultimately, a bad decision is still better than no decision. A bad decision can usually be addressed and fixed. However, a lack of decision holds up many things in the organization, be it events or colleagues. Procrastination has a significant negative impact. 

Oracle is a Gold Partner at TechHR Singapore on 28th February, 2019 at Marina Bay Sands, Singapore. Click here to register.