Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are crucial to Singapore's economy, representing 99% of all enterprises and employing 71% of the workforce. The Pulse of SMEs explores Singapore’s workforce landscape with a focus on SME employees’ career needs, aspirations, and challenges. It identifies where SMEs are facing difficulties or making strides in upskilling, motivating, and retaining talent. The study adopts a strengths-based perspective and applies archetypal analysis, segmenting organisations into four archetypes based on company types, employee size, and self-reported perception of their organisational growth.

Human capital is one of the most important resources in Singapore’s strategic economic plan. Accordingly, to drive higher productivity and economic growth, Singapore must support the health, resilience, and well-being of workers. This mixed-methods approach study investigates the well-being of workers in Singapore and seeks to understand the factors affecting worker well-being to provide appropriate support.

Freelancers & Self-Employed (FSE) professionals represent a growing yet underserved and understudied segment of the workforce. This study adopts a holistic, cross-industry approach to surface "Jobs-to-be-Done" (JTBD) to support FSEs in their pursuit of career growth progression. Our findings reveal opportunities for NTUC and the Labour Movement in Singapore to shape services and policies that address shared pain points beyond predefined worker categories.

The workplace in Singapore has evolved and work arrangements have shifted away from the traditional on-site, fixed-time, and fixed-workload structure. Over the years, NTUC has championed flexibility at work as a means of improving welfare for employees as well as supporting individuals with caregiving responsibilities. This Briefing Paper seeks to provide insights and case studies into how Flexible Work Arrangements (FWAs) can be implemented in a way that is a win-win for both companies and employees through three behaviourally informed recommendations.

Experienced and highly skilled essential tradespeople; including plumbers, electricians, air-conditioning and mechanical ventilation mechanics; often grapple with the issue of low wages and a negative association that their jobs are depicted as 'dirty, dangerous and demeaning’. These challenges, coupled with low fertility rates and an ageing population, hinder the recruitment of younger local workers to fill the gaps left by retiring tradespeople. This study seeks to provide insights into professionalising skilled essential trades and establishing a strong local core of skilled tradespeople in Singapore.

Persistent low birth rates have resulted in demographic shifts most notably in an ageing workforce and fewer young entrants into the labour force. This multi-methodology research study aims to paint a picture of Singapore’s future industry-specific labour force profile and identify key strategies to mitigate the impact of an ageing population and slowing workforce growth.

As Singapore's manufacturing faces renewed strengths and threats in a changing post-pandemic world, this study seeks to gather insights on how these challenges could affect the opportunities available for workers in the manufacturing sector here. This study also suggests how workers can navigate opportunities and risks by securing necessary skills to create strategic advantages in the sector.

This Harvard Business Review Analytic Services paper highlights NTUC’s innovation — the Company Training Committee, which enables companies to benefit from innovation and higher productivity, while workers enjoyed better wages, welfare and work prospects with new skills.

This study examined the role of labour unions in ensuring a Just Transition as industries shift towards a green economy, and proposed 10 strategic recommendations for the Labour Movement in the two areas of building greater partnerships and expanding existing Labour Movement activities.

This study examined the emerging global and local trends in the Information and communication technologies (ICT) sector, and proposed 10 strategic recommendations to help ICT Professionals reskill, upskill and adapt to changing skill demands arising from these emerging trends.