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Deputy Prime Minister (DPM) and Minister for Finance Brother Lawrence Wong, NTUC President Sister Mary Liew, fellow Central Committee members and dear Sisters and Brother.
This morning, I addressed some younger ones as “sister” and “brother” and found out they have a new term now in NTUC as well – “Hi Uncle.”
Each time I come into a youth event, I feel very energised by the atmosphere, the very presence of dynamism and exuberance that I can conquer all reminds me of when I was once really young.
It brings me great pleasure to be here one more time and very thankful that DPM, amidst his very busy schedule is honouring Young NTUC and supporting this event with all of you and we want to be alongside you to co-create and partner you, the Singapore that we want, both at your individual level as well as the collective.
I am very happy that I can stand here before you to give you the significance of today’s event.
Today is actually a culmination of one year of hard work as the master of ceremony has mentioned that we, as Young NTUC, went down to the ground to engage many of you. Very importantly, a majority (80%) of it were face to face interactions in this space.
As I said, the dynamism and the language you use makes me scratch my head sometimes, but each time I leave the engagements, I am refreshed. Both as an individual and all the work in NTUC we are doing, you really give us a purpose to work hard. And on that note, can I thank the Executive Secretary of Young NTUC, Wendy Tan?
My young friends, Wendy burnt, literally, the whole year, on weeknights and weekends, to put this NTUC Youth Taskforce together based on only nine staff she has but an army of volunteers that we have gotten across different parts of society, including some of you, young ones, students.
We hope that that is really a stepping stone to collectively co creating a space for all of you. But the NTUC Youth Taskforce report really distills out your key considerations, key worries, key aspirations to NTUC and I am glad we did this exercise so that now we not only think about what may be your challenges, but we have heard all of you and we understand youth that little better. We want to continue to partner you on this journey. In this final report, it is still a very first step in building that relationship with all the youths coming into the workforce, including those of you who are still in schools.
In the distillation of the all the complexities of the report, you have told NTUC and many of the youth leaders that you are concerned about career opportunities, financial literacy, financial planning, and very importantly, mental health.
In the detailing of the report, you have also told us that you want a more connected, more diverse, and more inclusive workplace, hoping that uncles like me or your bosses in the workplace can understand you and accommodate your desires. We hear all of that and we are really working very hard. With this clarity, we humbly take real first steps to address your needs and we are going to partner you.
Therefore, NTUC will provide youths with greater accessibility to mentorships with our new mentorship hub. We will work with our Singapore National Employers’ Federation partner to offer short term trials. You may have heard in the news that is the Career Starter Lab pilot.
We will work towards scaling up training of mental well being peers [inaudible]. Hopefully, in the next few years, 2500 peer supporters across different companies and different spaces to be your partner on the ground. We will continue to work with employers, schools, Institutes of Higher Learning (IHLs), to provide quality internship experiences that will be based on a continual feedback basis to keep improving and enhancing the work we are doing as a team, as a tripartite ecosystem for our youths.
Very importantly, let me do a membership sell. We really want to institutionalise our friendship, our relationship with you, the youths, with a the NTUC Starter membership.
This membership is tailored towards specific feedback and needs of the youths 25 years old and below. We want to make it hit and hopefully in time to come, we will be able to collaborate with you to work different programmes, not just in the workspace but also in the “play” space together with all of you so that we truly can be a friend in the workplace as well as your uncle in the [inaudible].
Beyond the report, there are two key things that I would like to update all of you today. One is to rehash the Career Starter Lab that we have put in place. On May Day, I mentioned about partnering 100 good companies to bring mentorship possibilities for students including NSmen that are coming out into the workspace.
We are very happy that we have more than 100 companies that are on board with us ranging from MNCs to SMEs who will help us look within this pilot programme what may be the lessons we can learn to ensure a good mentorship experience across different spaces in the workplace.
There will be 900 or so vacancies available, a little bit higher than what we thought and now we are starting to get the mentors and the training in place. And we will start accepting applications from all of you that may be interested from the 1st of September. This is very humbly submitted to you, a pilot. There will be many things that we will have to discover along the way, together with you and I hope many of you here today will come in into this project to help us do it better for your juniors. Being seniors in the workplace and in the process of transition and already paying it forward and anchor your purpose that I have heard many of you articulate to me (when we were on the ground)]. So, I really encourage you to participate in the programme, and when you benefit from this, you can really start preparing yourself to be youth mentors yourselves and coverages on the ground for the juniors in time to come.
The second news that I want to tell you is that I am very happy that just before this function, we had just signed the new Memorandum of Understanding with Institute of Technical Education (ITE).
In the Career Starter Lab, we are focusing on post-school youths going into the workplace, but with ITE, we know it is equally important. Within that ITE space that we have actually experimented from 3 years ago, we understand the same things that the students very much desire – career mentorship in the workplace, pre-employment workshops to understand somethings that adults take almost for granted - contract understanding, workplace rights, whether you can approach or who you can approach for workplace fairness and all the different things and including practical workplace experiences that [inaudible] can tell you.
So, we are very happy to have penned the MOU with ITE, CEO, Ms Low Khah Gek. Thank you for the opportunity for us to work together with ITE to foster mentorship of up to 1500 ITE students in the next couple of years. This experience hopefully will build towards a larger space beyond our Career Starter Lab’s [inaudible]. We have more students and youths coming into this programme, partnering educators and the companies that we are reaching out to. And very importantly, the pre-employment workshops will really be quite fun.
They will tell you about contracts and what may be the issues that you should look out for. We will try to bring in some CV writing for you to learn how to show your strengths, how to be humble where you need to be humble and maybe help you with some profiling of your own capabilities, photographs and everything as you go for your first interviews.
Whatever you need, we will try to guess.
We have asked many questions but please keep coming back to us to tell us what you need and we will improve these three employment workshops.
Very importantly, when you get into that space, we want to partner our employers and ITE to actually up the internship experience, make it high quality throughout for many of the students that are now wanting to have that experience in the workplace.
In conclusion, I would like to urge all of you to co-create with NTUC. We do not have all the answers. We want to put a formal relationship with all of you so that we can build in this youth space not only for your generation of young workers but in the future, your juniors as well so that we can grow a stronger space. For the workforce, whether you are 18 all the way to 25 or 35, you will be better supported in our society, in a world of rapid technological changes, in a world of great uncertainties and all the different things.
We hope to be your friend alongside. We hope to co-create and partner you in your journey. Thank you very much.
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