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In Singapore, mid-career workers face the brunt of job losses in the looming coronavirus recession
- Experts say the looming recession will hit more experienced employees hardest, as they are expensive to employ and find it difficult to retrain
- The city state’s focus on upskilling should help soften the blow somewhat, but knowledge gaps and a resistance to hiring older workers remain
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Sales consultant Kirstin Goh, 38,was relieved when she landed a job in November last year. She had spent her whole career working for relocations companies and rose to manage a team of four, but was made redundant in 2018 amid dwindling demand for relocation services as employers increasingly did away with expatriate compensation packages that included this perk. Little did she know a pandemic would soon hit the world, accelerating her industry’s decline.
In March, after just five months, she was again let go from her job – this time finding housing for people moving across the globe. Since January, she said, a trend of cancellations snowballed until “with these restricted movements” worldwide almost all her prospective clients had pulled out. “We were a team of 20 and now the whole team is gone,” she said.
Goh is one of the many Singaporeans whose livelihoods are expected to take a hit amid the economic fallout from Covid-19, in what is shaping up to be one of the worst global recessions in living memory. Singapore’s trade ministry has predicted that the bellwether economy could shrink by up to 7 per cent, a level not seen since it gained independence, as economists forecast 200,000 to be out of work in the city state by the end of the year.
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Those in the middle of their careers like Goh have it worse, experts say, citing how they would find it hard to compete with fresh graduates as they are often perceived as inflexible and unable to quickly adapt to fast-moving work environments.
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Meanwhile, the pandemic is reshaping the jobs market as it decimates industries such as tourism that rely on international travel, and accelerates the process of digitalisation as public health measures such as social distancing push companies to rely more on technology. For senior research fellow Faizal Yahya from the National University of Singapore (NUS)’s Institute of Policy Studies, the pandemic has merely hastened the latest technological revolution that requires companies to increasingly operate in the online space – capturing customer data and leveraging it to tailor their products and services, for example, with many feeling the “need to enhance remote working by ensuring connectivity and seamless work process flows”.
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