Teaching tomorrow’s jobs

However, cutting-edge technical skills are only one part of ensuring relevance. Educators in the polytechnic system are also placing increasing weight on evergreen skills like critical thinking and interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly in how they adjust to technology’s rapid and often unexpected disruption of learning models.

“Instead of worrying that students will use generative AI to cheat, we asked ourselves: How can we redesign our assessments so that generative AI is part of the learning process?” says Tang. “Rather than asking students to write a program that does X, we might change it to ‘use generative AI to generate this program, then critique it. Is it good? No good? Are there errors? Is it more efficient compared to other programs?”

Alyssa Nah, who recently joined DBS Bank’s graduate programme as a junior software engineer, highlights cross-background collaboration as one such evergreen—and highly useful—skill she picked up while earning her financial informatics diploma at Ngee Ann Polytechnic. “We get to work with very diverse groups, which helps build confidence to operate in a range of different teams and environments,” the 24-year-old explains, pointing at the overseas internship she undertook up as part of her course as one example. 

“In that internship, I was working with people from India, China, and Australia—having to flex and adapt to very different working styles all at once. That ability to understand the team, understand the dynamics, and adapt from there has already been useful in both university and my graduate job.”

“We’re constantly reminding ourselves: Don’t spoon-feed your students,” Tang says. “We’ve moved away from examinations and scoring grades, towards asking: What is relevant? Will it help solve problems? Is this what is needed in the industry and economy?

“No matter what the course, we always leave certain areas as self-directed learning so that by the time the students reach their compulsory final-year internships, they are ready to learn whatever the company needs them to learn.”

When I speak to Tan just weeks out from his own internship, he exudes quiet confidence about what’s to come, highlighting three ways in which his career and technical education has readied him for the future. The first is Agile methodology—one of Tang’s “effective across all domains” skills, and a recent addition to the Diploma in IT course because of its widespread adoption in complex organisations fielding large-scale projects. The second is strong competency across multiple technical stacks, which Tan calls a “very good investment of time—not just technically, but because it helps me develop my ability to learn new technologies.” The last is communication skills, from writing emails to presenting in meetings.

“I know I’ll be using these skills a lot in the workplace. It’s good that Poly introduced them so I can be prepared,” says Tan.

“I may need to pick up new things, but what I’ve learnt previously won’t go to waste,” says Nah of her polytechnic diploma and internship. “Technical skills are quite transferrable, and I’m not too worried about shifting to a different field, because the fundamentals are there.”

How can Singapore’s businesses make the most of a new generation with increasingly adaptable, versatile skill sets? Don’t underestimate their drive to learn, for starters. “We don’t need to tell our students to work hard,” says Temasek Polytechnic’s Tang. “We see the energy in every generation. They’re well equipped in terms of using technology for learning, and they’ve gotten a very good foundation for being ready to work in industry.”

Nah advises enterprises to establish learning pathways that expose new hires to both practical challenges and diverse perspectives, an approach also increasingly espoused in Singapore’s public policy. “It’s a very efficient way of teaching, where you can quickly groom people to the capabilities you want to fill,” Nah says of her own graduate programme experience. “All our employers tell us that as a generation, we learn really fast, so the best thing you can do is create a safe space to learn.”

Such safe spaces would equip all employees to learn and keep on learning—simultaneously competing and collaborating with each other to adapt to whatever new technologies or conditions emerge. For businesses looking for a template, Tan already knows where to find one: the very same polytechnic classrooms he’s about to graduate from.

“My friends at Poly are all very technically competent on their own, but we’re very willing to share what we learn. And when one of us gets an achievement, we all won’t hesitate to congratulate that person—even though we were all competing against each other,” says Tan who hopes to bring that same spirit of encouragement to his future workplaces. “Greatness, for me, is being able to help someone else so we can work together and improve together.”