For the past two years, "AI took my job" has become the default headline. It is a tidy story: a machine arrives, a role disappears. But a growing body of research suggests the tidy story is, at best, incomplete — and for graduates in Singapore specifically, the more useful question isn't "is AI coming for me" but "am I, without quite meaning to, making myself easier to replace." What the global research actually shows Scott Galloway has been making a version of this point on

Ask most organisations how AI has changed their structure, and the honest answer is: it hasn't, really. New tools, new habits, the same boxes and lines on the same chart. For a meaningful slice of that group, that's not a problem — it's simply not where the constraint sits. For a growing number of others, running AI through an unchanged structure is exactly where things are starting to strain, and no amount of "use the tool more responsibly" is going to fix a shape that was n

Every organisation hiring for a role has, in effect, already published two lists — even though only one of them ever makes it into the job description. The first list is explicit: the minimum requirements. An accounting degree or diploma and a few years in a similar function for a finance role. The right qualification and hands-on experience for an engineering one. Organisations are usually very clear about this list, and for good reason — it's how a candidate first signals t

How to separate what the data shows from what we think it means Imagine you're looking at your organisation's training data and you notice something interesting: employees who attend more training also tend to receive higher performance ratings. That's encouraging. Perhaps even encouraging enough to put on a management slide: Employees who attend more training perform better. But is that actually what the data told us? Perhaps the training improved their performance, but ther

When people say Singapore is "safe," they usually mean more than one thing at once, and it's worth pulling those apart. There's the safety of being able to walk home at night without worrying about being robbed. There's the safety of living in your own home without worrying about a fire. There's the safety of getting from one place to another without worrying about being killed or injured on the way. And there's a quieter, bigger one: the safety of simply not having your life

As AI reshapes work, perhaps the harder question is not how many people we train, but how we know whether that training genuinely changed their future. One part of this year's National Day Rally stayed with me: as Singapore embraces AI and other new technologies, we also need to help workers adapt as jobs change. As someone who works in both analytics and training, it made me think about a deceptively simple question. How will we know whether our reskilling efforts actually w

Singapore runs on comparison. Fresh out of university, it's your starting pay against what your cohort quietly agrees is respectable. A few years in, it's when you'll make manager, and what a manager "should" earn by then. Later, it's whether you've made director. Alongside it all runs a second, more visible scorecard — the car, the postal code, condo or resale flat. Each milestone is really the same question: am I on track, or falling behind? It's an understandable instinct

One big table is often easier to start with. A Star Schema is usually easier to live with. Let’s start with a different question If someone asked me this during a training break, I probably wouldn’t answer it straight away. I’d ask a question of my own. “Tell me about the report you’re building.” It might sound like I’m avoiding the question, but I’m really not. In fact, I think it’s the only sensible place to begin. Are you trying to answer a question from your manager befor

Singapore is growing older every year — that part isn't in dispute. Citizens aged 65 and above made up 20.7% of the resident population in June 2025, up from 13.1% a decade earlier, and are projected to reach almost a quarter of citizens by 2030 (Source: Population in Brief 2025). Most conversations about this shift focus on healthcare costs, retirement adequacy, and workforce planning. Fewer focus on a quieter, harder question: as more seniors live alone — never married, out

When GovTech announced it was letting go of 93 staff in the first phase of a shift to a new operating model, the story travelled fast — and the reactions travelled faster. Within days, the conversation had moved well past GovTech itself: comment sections were relitigating whether the civil service is still an "iron rice bowl," whether the retrenched staff had been treated fairly, whether age had quietly played a role given that 42 per cent of those affected were in their fort