Effectiveness of Professional Conversion Programme

24 Mr Pritam Singh asked the Minister for Manpower in light of the Auditor-General's Report for FY 2019/2020, (a) whether the Ministry will be undertaking a more wide-scale review of the number of successful career conversions and Professional Conversion Programme outcomes thus far; and (b) what will be the extent of sample checks to be conducted on grant Programme Partners by Workforce Singapore or the Ministry in future.

The Minister for Manpower (Mrs Josephine Teo): Mr Speaker, Professional Conversion Programmes (PCPs) provide training and salary support to employers who hire and reskill mid-career jobseekers for new PMET jobs with good prospects. WSG currently works with 30 programme partners, including Trade Associations and Chambers and Institutes of Higher Learning, to run close to 100 PCPs in about 30 sectors.

A significant majority of our PCP participants have enjoyed good employment outcomes. About nine in 10 participants remained in employment 24 months after being placed and about seven in 10 earned higher wages after starting their new jobs. The Auditor-General's Office (AGO)’s audit findings do not call into question the impact of these programmes on the participants, but have highlighted issues with the practices of WSG’s programme partners and its supervision of them.

In the AGO's Report for the Financial Year 2019/2020, it was highlighted that three of WSG’s programme partners did not carry out adequate verification of career conversion for 11 disbursement cases involving 15 PCP participants. There was no doubt that the training had been properly carried out but AGO noted that programme partners had not documented how the participants’ previous and current job scopes were different, which is the requirement for the training to be supported under the PCP. WSG has reviewed each of these cases and verified that all 15 participants changed their job scopes and successfully converted into new job roles through their respective PCPs. In addition, to address the AGO's concern about the adequacy of its guidelines, WSG will be developing a new PCP guide for all its programme partners by the end of the year. The document will include guidelines on how career conversion should be consistently assessed, as well as the critical information that programme partners should report to ensure better and consistent monitoring of PCP outcomes.

AGO also checked 16 PCPs managed by eight programme partners and found inadequate monitoring of programme outcomes for 10 PCPs. The programme partners did not collect the complete set of performance indicators required by WSG and also had varying practices in collecting the information. WSG has since reviewed and streamlined its approach. Henceforth, programme partners will focus on the most important outcome indicators, namely, the number of placements and number of participants who completed training, both of which are straightforward to monitor and report.

Beyond the cases studied by AGO, WSG, on its own, initiated a comprehensive check of over 15,000 placements for similar lapses. This is the entire universe of PCP placements since 2016. Although the review will only be fully completed this year, WSG has not uncovered further lapses or systemic anomalies thus far.

Mr Speaker, ensuring good governance and outcomes for our programmes is a key priority for MOM and WSG. WSG has reiterated to all programme partners the need to adhere to the PCP administration process, including assessment of career conversion for participants, as well as the importance of close tracking and timely reporting of key programme outcome indicators. To ensure compliance with these requirements, WSG will conduct sampling checks of up to 20% of PCP placements by its programme partners on a regular basis.

WSG remains committed to working closely with its programme partners to ensure sound governance and effectiveness of PCPs. It will also continue to strengthen its supervision over them.

Mr Speaker: Mr Pritam Singh.

Mr Pritam Singh (Aljunied): Thank you, Mr Speaker. I thank the Minister for the reply to my Parliamentary Question. The PCP programme, as carried out under WSG, is a critical one to ensure that Singaporeans, especially PMETs, get into good jobs, and to that end, I think all of us have a deep interest in the programmes' success.

I would like to focus on one of the observations of the AGO which is at page 63 of the Report. I believe Minister covered it in her reply, where a test check – and AGO cannot check every case; they do test checks – and the test check revealed that 11 out of 56 cases found that there was inadequate verification of career conversion for trainees. The AGO also noted cases "where the trainees' previous and current job scope appeared to be similar". Those are the exact words.

My specific questions are which were the three programme partners identified in the AGO Report? Minister, I believe, in her reply mentioned that there is an on-going review of all PCP matters. I think this number is 15,000 placements. How prevalent is the problem of a similar job scope, after a PMET worker has undertaken a PCP programme?

Mrs Josephine Teo: Mr Speaker, I thank the Member Mr Pritam Singh for his questions and also for acknowledging the critical importance of the Professional Conversion Programmes in helping our PMETs move on to new job roles, most of the time outside of their existing companies and industries, but sometimes within the same company or within the same industry.

He acknowledged their importance and raised the question of the findings by the AGO on the career conversion.

I should emphasise this – the AGO noted that the career conversion was not well documented but it did not say that there was no career conversion. And, on subsequent checks, WSG established the clear fact that there was career conversion and it was a question of the programme partner not having properly documented this.

So, it was not that the job scopes did not change substantially. It was simply the fact that the programme partners did not document them properly and they did not have a very consistent way of assessing the degree of career conversion and the degree of change of the job scopes across different programme partners.

I would just want to emphasise this that there was, in fact, the change in job scope. WSG's verification confirmed this and it was a question of documentation. That being the case, we focus on fixing the problem of documentation. And I think I have explained earlier on in my reply how we go about doing so.

Mr Speaker: Mr Pritam Singh.

Mr Pritam Singh: Thank you, Speaker. I thank the Minister for that reply. I would assume, having read the AGO Report that there would have been some time for WSG to respond, as the Minister has in Parliament, in the AGO Report as to that particular matter of documentation – that, really, it is not that the outcome was not achieved but the documentation was not done properly.

I understand that. My query is, was there enough time for WSG to inform the AGO that it is looking into these findings of the AGO and, thereafter, the reply could have been in the AGO Report? Or whether there was not enough time? So, that is the first question. The second question was, as part of my original Supplementary Question, was about the identities of the three programme partners.

Mrs Josephine Teo: In the AGO Report, if we look at its reporting of findings in other Ministries, it is quite consistent. Even if the agencies have addressed the issue, it does not prevent the AGO from making the Report. That is the merit of the system – that regardless of the actions that have been taken up to follow up on the findings, the AGO's responsibility is to report them so that the public is aware that there were these lapses. We acknowledged the lapse and we fixed it.

As to the names of the three programme partners, certainly, if Mr Singh is very interested, we can provide it to him. But I think the question really is, "Did the programme partners make a mistake in good faith or did they deliberately try to defraud the Government in some way?" And if our assessment is that they deliberately attempted to try and defraud the Government in some way, then the appropriate action is to report them to the Police so that a complete investigation can be conducted. At the appropriate juncture, their identities will be made public.

But, in this case, it was an incident of the programme partners not having done a thorough job of documenting what, in fact, did happen. So, we do not as a matter of practice regularly name programme partners for sometimes administrative errors that they have committed.

Mr Speaker: Mr Alex Yam.