Outgoing labour chief Lim Swee Say drops Zorro's mask for Spidey's Spider-sense

Now, that's major "skills upgrading".

Tan Xing Qi| March 05, 03:14 PM

In probably his last hurrah as labour chief, Lim Swee Say has officially graduated from being just Zorro to a web-slinging superhero.

At the Budget debate in Parliament yesterday, the 60-year-old labour-chief-turned-futurist, who will be stepping down from his NTUC post, spoke at length about "embracing the future", a premonition that can rival Spidey's famous Spider-sense.

Anyway, NMP Lina Chiam clearly agreed with him.

Labour chief's spider-sense

Here's something to explain the said precognitive superpower.

spider sense

He deftly explained that tingling sensation by saying that employers and employees should future-proof themselves because "3D printing, robotisation, uberisation, big data, the Internet of things, digitisation of services, online-to-offline, offline-to-online - all these are coming".

If not, to carry on with the almost-strike-by-lightning gif (and alluding to nothing else, really), this might happen to you if you don't future-proof yourself.

strike by lightning

We kid. But the possibility of economic stagnation due to low or negative productive growth of companies and workers is no laughing matter.

"When that happens, wages will go down, unemployment will go up, re-employment will drop, there will be less or no Budget surplus and it will be harder for us to try to do more good for our people."

To really illustrate that future is, erm, the future. He had this to say to all employers who find it hard to survive in Singapore and are chasing for cheaper locations to set up shops:

"I don't think businesses should (keep) going west, keep chasing after sunsets, keep going for lower-cost locations. Eventually you'll end up with darkness."

"Why not fly east? The night will be shorter and the sun rise will come sooner. And when the sun rise comes, we can stay in the sun for as long as we can until the time comes for us to move to the next sun rise."

Lim the mathematician

And to workers, he encouraged them to utilise the $500 SkillsFuture credits to upgrade themselves.

"Let us help our workers to learn hard skills, soft skills, but most importantly help them to learn to be a 'rescale-able' worker. Rescaling will not stop because the future will not stop changing."

Lim, whose dream was to be a Mathematics professor, also said that only two-thirds of jobs need to be redesigned, as one-third of the workforce will still be made up of foreigners. Using the analogy of "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts", he said how the SkillsFuture credits can improve productivity, which means:

"two-thirds plus one-third can (add up to more) than one."

Futurise this

All this talk about the future is so advanced that, try as he might, he couldn't find an appropriate word in the dictionary.

So the wordsmith of Singapore (remember "betterer", "bottleneck breakers"?) added the word "futurise" to the Singapore lexicon, prompting the 170-year-old The Straits Times to use it twice in the their story.

Screen Shot 2015-03-05 at 11.37.23 amScreen Shot 2015-03-05 at 11.37.44 am

Doesn't matter if it doesn't feature on any oxforddictionaries.com. It will be. One day. In the future.

Because his Spider-sense said so.

 

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