From Matchsticks to A.I.: How Singapore built a global talent pool from scratch

When clients and friends visit Singapore, one of my favorite places to show them is the glittering Marina Bay where the regional offices of tech and financial titans Facebook, Amazon, Grab, Standard Chartered and JP Morgan — just to name a few — all look back at us. It is a beautiful sight: a metaphor for the global business hub we are today and a manifestation of our phenomenal development from third world to first in only half a century. “Hard to believe it was just 50 years ago that we could only make low-value goods like matchsticks, huh?” Jaws inadvertently drop as they ask, “How is that possible?”

Skills to light the way

Following the withdrawal of British troops and separation from Malaysia, the nascent Singapore government knew it had to pursue an export-led industrialization strategy to accelerate economic growth, create jobs, and put Singapore on the map. But how do you do that in 1965, with a population of 1.9 million relatively unskilled people?

My grandmother recalls the early days when foreign signs started popping up around the island. Soon, word on the street was that these “ang mohs” were hiring at their factories. The government sought to attract foreign investors to catalyze our economic transformation by starting with labor-intensive manufacturing industries such as fishing nets and hair wigs; over time, the expertise evolved into higher value electronics, pharmaceuticals, and petrochemicals.

As our industries rapidly transformed, the types of talent we needed to groom and attract also evolved. STEM became a central tenet of our education system. My ever-astute grandma made sure her children focused on academic studies to get ahead. But Singapore still needed more people. Our immigration policies were heavily influenced by what the economy needed to transform: process engineers to design advanced production facilities; researchers to push the boundaries of product development; and today, leaders in automation, AI, and deep learning to take us to into the digital future.

Many investors tell me that Singapore’s English-speaking environment and reputation for justice, safety and security have been attractive for experts to relocate themselves and their families. It’s much more than just a managed open-door policy — we also need to create conditions for technology transfer to occur so that knowledge is anchored locally. In my line of work, I strategize with companies on training local hires so as to ensure long-term knowledge transfer. And I am always gratified when qualified fellow Singaporeans ascend to senior roles.

But that is not enough. The government also needs to anticipate what skill sets businesses need in the future and work with the education system to build that pipeline of job-seekers. When we decided to build a cybersecurity sector from scratch, we asked Kaspersky to help us train our first batch of cyber experts. The next generation of Singaporeans can now look forward to the AI Apprenticeship Programme managed by the government’s national AI initiative. There are even short-term stints such as the Smart Nation Fellowship to bring top data scientists and technologists to our public sector.

Lighting the way home

Talent attraction doesn’t always have to be foreign immigration. Singaporeans too have done well overseas and many have found their way into the echelons of the global technology sector. Singapore recognizes the importance of the 215,000-strong overseas network and keeping them in touch with home, via our Overseas Singaporean Unit and Contact Singapore offices. There are also programmes such as Returning Singaporean Scientists to recruit renowned Singaporean repats back to leadership positions in our public research sector. But our efforts have been of mixed success. We managed to attract several top scientists from Silicon Valley to help lead the government’s own digital transformation under GovTech; despite tech giants like Google and Facebook expanding rapidly in Singapore with significant regional roles, many overseas Singaporeans still find the allure of Silicon Valley hard to leave. We don’t yet have the silver bullet to this piece and are constantly reassessing our initiatives to be more attractive.

At the ripe age of 88, my grandmother has seen the vast transformation that Singapore has undergone in her lifetime. She counts Germans, Americans, Japanese and Australians as her neighbors in her high-rise condo; and she is elated that her favorite granddaughter (i.e., me) is also a repat coming home after 5 years away. The future of Singapore is only as bright as the sparks that we can groom from within, recruit from without and retain till the end.

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Dawn Lim recently graduated as a Sloan Fellow from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and has returned to the Singapore public service to continue her passion for economic development. She has spent more than a decade working in infrastructure, logistics and economic development for Singapore. The views expressed in this article are entirely her own. This is the third in a series of posts that Dawn is writing in collaboration with Alter Global.