With sights set on Industry 4.0, Singapore’s National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) has partnered with Singapore Polytechnic (SP) to equip more than 1000 workers for the future of manufacturing. The NTUC hopes to impart knowledge about smart technologies and new manufacturing techniques to the existing workforce through this initiative.

The main aim of the partnership is to prepare companies for Industry 4.0, create a skilled human resource pool and establish a strong industry connection. The three entities have signed a MoU that promises to leverage SP’s technical expertise to equip NTUC’s EPME and e2i workers in order to take them to the next level of expertise.

Some areas where such partnership will prove to be valuable include enabling small and medium enterprises that lack resources to build their own prototypes or invest in innovation labs to tap into SP’s facilities and build new products. These small ventures can experiment with new equipment and software using SP’s expertise.  

SP’s deputy principal (development), Hee Joh Liang says it is about “embracing for the next industrial revolution.”

NTUC’s Electronics and Precision & Machinery Engineering (EPME) Cluster, NTUC’s e2i (Employment and Employability Institute) along with the Industry Transformation Maps (ITM) have declared this October as the EPME month.

SP’s PACE Academy will help in providing specialized training and certification programs to the workers.  Gilbert Tan, NTUC’s assistant director-general and e2i CEO, sees this partnership as a way to improve the collective skill set of the sector. Tan wants to make the sector’s workers competitive enough to succeed in an ever-changing landscape of Industry 4.0.

Melvin Yong, Supervising Lead of NTUC EPME Cluster and NTUC assistant secretary-general, believes the partnership is just one part of the multiple collaborations that NTUC plans to forge in order to upskill and train workers and turn them into strong human capital assets.

Singapore is seeing several such partnerships between trade unions, government entities and higher education institutes. Earlier in July, Singapore Polytechnic was a part of the cluster that launched SAP Skills University Singapore to develop training programmes that would help Singaporeans to build skills in the ICT sector.