SSG Launches Interactive Dashboards on Jobs and Skills Data, Spotlights Singapore’s Creative Industries in Latest Skills Report

SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG) published the latest edition of Skills Demand for the Future Economy Report (Skills Report) today. The Skills Report details priority skills and job roles in growth economies, to share insights that can help Singaporeans in planning their skills development and career journey. Interactive dashboards were also released to allow the public and interested organisations to explore and discover insights, contextualised to their own needs. The report was launched by Minister of State for Education and Manpower Gan Siow Huang officially this morning.

What this edition is about

SSG studied five years of job posting data from 2019 to 2023, to understand changes to job requirements for skills, and the use of digital applications and tools (“Apps & Tools”). As with past editions, we continued to focus on the priority skills in the Green, Digital and Care Economies. In addition, we did a deep dive on skills for the Creative Industries, where jobs and tasks are both reliant on human ingenuity while also profoundly affected by advances in Information Technology.

Priority skills in the three economies

Based on historical data from 2022 to 2024, we tracked the changes to the demand of priority skills in the Green, Digital and Care economies, specifically, their absolute demand (i.e. number of job postings requiring these skills) and their transferability (i.e. spread of the demand across different job roles). These two axes, absolute demand and demand spread, define the four quadrants in the Skills Matrix used in the report. SSG found that:

1. 71 skills [e.g. Agile Software Development and Applications Development for the Digital Economy] were consistently in high demand and were highly transferable across the three years, with this trend expected to continue into 2025;

2. 37 skills [e.g. Design for Maintainability and Utilities Management for the Green Economy] moved from moderate to high transferability in 2024, with this trend expected to continue into 2025. This movement indicates that more industry sectors are adopting a particular business practice or technology; and

3. 34 skills [e.g. Learning and Development and Staff Training Management for the Care Economy] are forecasted to be highly transferable in 2025.

Training providers should leverage the Priority Skills Dashboard to understand skill trends to anticipate market needs and plan their training accordingly. Please refer to Annex A for more details on the priority skills that were analysed on the Skills Matrix.

Enhanced understanding of job requirements - Apps and Tools

Apps and Tools are today widely used across many job roles. This year, we curated a comprehensive list of Apps and Tools which, alongside skills, provide a more complete understanding of what a job requires of a worker.

Proficiency requirements for Apps and Tools are found most often in job postings for work functions in IT (25%), Engineering (13%), and Operations (8%). The Skills Report also notes that the top 20 Apps & Tools in 2023 comprised mainly of productivity tools, programming languages, and software designed for managing data, processes and projects.

With significant industry attention on Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications, SSG looked into the subset of AI-related¹ Apps & Tools, such as Java, Python, and Google Analytics. Proficiency requirements for AI-related Apps & Tools are found most often in job postings for work functions in IT (29%), Engineering (12%), and Research (7%).

From 2019 to 2023, the four AI-related Apps & Tools that grew the most in demand were: Microsoft CRM (Customer Relationship Management) (22^nd to 14^th), AWS Cloud9 (26^th to 15^th), Microsoft Azure (35^th to 16^th), and ServiceNow (23^rd to 18^th). The upward movement of these AI-related Apps & Tools suggests that more employers are leveraging cloud services to enhance business processes.

Employers and employees keen to learn more about the changing requirements of different job roles can utilise the new Job Requirements Dashboard. The Dashboard can provide jobs-skills insights specific to job roles, and assist in the tailoring of workplace training and personal upskilling for these roles.

Technological advancements change skills requirements for Creative Industries jobs

There are about 150,000 Creative professionals in Singapore, one-third of whom work in companies categorised under “Creative Industries”, while two-thirds take on creative roles in other companies.

Skills related to Business, Financial Management, and People Management remain in high demand for creative industries jobs, while the demand for skills related to 'Operation Excellence' has been rising.  

Skillsets required for Creative Industries jobs are becoming more transferrable, becoming a requirement for jobs not traditionally deemed as part of the creative sector. SSG’s sample found that 7 out of 10 of these “non-creative job roles” require creative skills. For instance, software developers need to understand design to make apps that are easy for people to use. Restaurant managers need skills in branding and attracting customers, not just in running a kitchen.

More workers in the Creative Industries are adopting tools with generative AI capability, such as for 3D modelling in jewellery making, and for social media content creation. SSG surveyed about 100 creative professionals, and over 50% of them use GenAI tools. Some popular tools include ChatGPT, Adobe Firefly, and Midjourney.

The survey also found that Creative professionals view GenAI as a tool to enhance efficiency and spark ideas, rather than as substitute for human ingenuity. Creative professionals emphasise the importance of applying human creativity and AI capabilities in a mutually reinforcing way. They expressed concerns over issues of ethics, intellectual property, and output quality related to generative AI use, which suggest that there could be emerging job roles, tasks or skills dedicated to addressing these concerns.

Tool for career transition

For a start, SSG and our partners examined five factors that made career transition viable from one job role to the other. These factors are: (a) their respective wage levels; (b) their respective levels of demand; (c) their respective demand growth; (d) skills similarity across them; and (e) historical transitions across them.

This analysis was based on the preliminary 342 job roles for which the data was more complete, and which showed strong demand growth.

The five factors are incorporated into a publicly available Skills and Job Mobility Dashboard, which can be used to understand how the different factors can be considered together when exploring career transition opportunities. We plan to expand and improve this tool, as guided by user feedback.

Online Portal for Jobs-Skills Resources

To enhance access to job-skills data and insights, SSG has launched an online portal to better share its jobs-skills insights and related resources - [https://jobsandskills.skillsfuture.gov.sg/]. The latest Skills Report can be found on the new online portal, alongside existing publications, such as earlier editions of the Skills Reports. The datasets and data dashboards can also be found on the new portal. SSG will continually enhance the platform with more data, insights and resources to empower Singaporeans, enterprises and training partners to make better informed decisions on jobs and skills and ensure our workforce remains relevant. We hope for users to also provide feedback and insights so that we collectively raise our understanding of skills requirements that help our workers stay relevant and competitive.

¹AI-related refers broadly to apps & tools that leverage AI capabilities or enable the use of AI. 

Refer to Annex A.