Where mobility now defines career health, Singapore’s AI ambitions can provide the booster that helps sustain it.
Career health is becoming one of Singapore’s most important competitive determinants. More than employment stability, it reflects a worker’s ability to remain employable, adaptable, and upwardly progressing across a lifetime of technological and economic change. At its core is mobility – the capacity to shift across roles, adopt new tools, and reinvent one’s relevance as industries evolve.
Singapore continues to post strong labour-market numbers, yet deeper signals suggest rising rigidity. Structured training participation fell to 40.7 percent in 2024, a nine-year low. Average job tenure has lengthened to roughly eight years. Fresh graduates show growing anxiety about job transitions in an AI-driven economy. The labour market appears to be outpacing traditional career pathways.
Career health, like physical health, depends not only on individual choices but on the environment that shapes them. At the Bloomberg New Economy Forum this week, Singapore’s Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan warned that the world is being reshaped by several revolutions at once. Singapore’s career environment is undergoing the same transformation.
Three revolutions reshaping career mobility
AI is the most visible force. The IMF estimates that 60 percent of jobs in advanced economies face significant AI exposure. IMDA’s data suggests that many jobs in Singapore contain significant automatable tasks. Nearly six in ten young workers say uncertainty about AI makes them hesitant to switch roles. Hybrid skills – combining digital literacy, communication, and domain expertise – are now the foundation of career resilience.
Biotech and longevity form the second shift. The biomedical sector now contributes nearly a fifth of Singapore’s total manufacturing output, while the National Precision Medicine programme aims to sequence the genomes of up to 450,000 residents by 2031 – building on over 100,000 already studied. With AI-enabled genomics accelerating drug discovery, early disease detection, and health system planning, longer lifespans will increasingly stretch careers across distinct phases: From specialist roles to hybrid or managerial positions, to advisory and cross-border work later in life, driving demand for talent that bridges science and data.
The green transition is the third force. Hydrogen pilots are scaling, green data centre standards are tightening, and the carbon-services ecosystem is maturing, signalling a shift to a more distributed, technology-driven energy model. This transformation is driving structural change across the labour market: Workers in marine, petrochemicals, and industrial engineering are moving toward new pathways in energy storage, grid optimisation, and systems integration. As energy anchors the AI-powered digital economy – which now accounts for nearly a fifth of GDP – these ongoing shifts are reorganising industry ecosystems and demanding adaptable talent prepared for rapidly evolving sectors.
Across these three forces, career health rests increasingly on mobility. Firms and individuals can support it in at least three ways.
Three ways to boost career health
First, firms should treat AI as literacy rather than a niche technical skillset. At Temus, we adopted a T-shaped talent model that pairs depth in one domain with the breadth to work across others; some colleagues now develop M-shaped profiles spanning multiple specialisations. As AI becomes more accessible, employees across functions are experimenting with its use to make their work more efficient. One example is Temus’ head of legal vibe-coding to build a chatbot for day-to-day legal matters. A recent firmwide “innovation sprint” saw cross-functional teams – including many with no technical background – develop GenAI tools for project management, document evaluation, and client workflows. Together, these efforts have built a T-Shape Community – now more than one-fifth of Temus employees – where colleagues learn from one another and develop AI fluency, enhancing their career health within the firm and for future roles beyond it.
Secondly, Singapore’s progress on inclusive workforce integration could help strengthen career health more broadly across the economy. Labour-force participation among persons with disabilities has risen from 28.2 per cent in 2019 to 32.7 percent in 2023. Ensign InfoSecurity’s partnership with the Autism Resource Centre is a leading example. Beyond recruitment, Ensign invests in structured assessment, role design, and workplace coaching so individuals on the autism spectrum can perform effectively as Security Operations Centre analysts. VITAL’s collaboration with Human Capital Singapore and SG Enable offers a similar model in HR and shared services, where targeted training prepares individuals for payroll and administrative roles with strong task alignment. The next phase will require reducing communication barriers and delivering customised training at scale. The National Council of Social Service’s pilot of conversational AI – initially supporting officers conducting early needs assessments with youths – shows how sensitive, multilingual interactions can be handled with consistency. Applied thoughtfully, could similar technology make communication, task guidance, and job matching more accessible, expanding workplace integration for persons with disabilities too?
Finally, individual mobility becomes more viable when workers adopt what leadership expert Kevin Cottam calls a nomadic mindset – a concept introduced to me by Temus’ Chief People Officer, Melissa Kee. Nomads thrive through reinvention and lateral movement; Settlers prefer predictability and routine. As nomad traits grow increasingly salient amid rapid environmental change, one development to watch is the Skills Learnability Index pioneered by Singapore’s Institute for Adult Learning. The data-driven analytics platform maps in-demand skills across occupations, estimates the difficulty and time required to acquire them, and identifies realistic transitions between roles. Its interactive dashboard provides personalised, evidence-based pathways for reskilling and career reinvention, giving individuals clearer visibility of emerging skills and viable next steps. As employers shift toward skills-first hiring and portfolios of demonstrated capability, coupling such AI-guided fluency with the adaptability of the nomad can strengthen lifelong learning – and, ultimately, career health.
Career health as Singapore’s national advantage
“It is very clear now that AI will be a fundamental driving force for the economy for the next five to 10 years. In Singapore, we have an opportunity to be at the frontier of global AI innovation”, said Jeffrey Siow, Singapore’s Acting Minister for Transport and Senior Minister of State for Finance.
This ambition matters not only for Singapore’s wider economic strategy, but because it strengthens Singaporeans’ ability to adapt and stay relevant as the pace of change continues to quicken. And as long as the country anchors itself at the centre of global digital and AI networks, it can turn that adaptability into a national advantage – supporting an economy where careers become not only longer, but healthier and more inclusive too.
Marcus Loh is the Chairman of the Public Affairs Group at the Public Relations and Communications Association (PRCA) Asia Pacific and a Director at Temus, a Singapore-based digital services firm. Formerly the President of the Institute of Public Relations of Singapore, he helped strengthen the role of strategic communication and public affairs amid shifting policy, technological, and geoeconomic landscapes. He is currently an MA candidate at the War Studies Department of King’s College London.
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