During the early 1990s, Singapore embarked on the IT2000 master-plan aimed at transforming the nation into an intelligent island, where information technology (IT) would permeate every aspect of our society – at home, work, and play. With this master-plan came a need to train up a substantial supply of computer programmers.
Under that context, many young students like me went on to pursue diplomas and degrees in computer studies that would have landed them with jobs in the promising IT industry.
Upon graduation and armed with a computer programming diploma awarded by a local Polytechnic, I realized that I neither had the interest nor the aptitude for computer science. I went on to pursue a career in sales and marketing and since then, had never had to apply what I learned from my computer studies.
The path that I have taken is what the Singapore government would term as a “leakage” where young graduates go on to pursue careers that are considerably different from their field of studies.
“Leakages” should be minimized because the investment of national resources would have failed to earn the intended returns. Furthermore, the individuals would have spent a number of years of their lives unhappy and unfulfilled studying fields that they neither enjoy nor are good at. The misery would be extended if they actually go on to pursue careers in those fields.
In August last year, during a dialogue session with students pertaining to the necessity of a university degree in Singapore, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong commented that a university degree need not be the only route to a fulfilling career for young Singaporeans.
Prime Minister Lee said: “The answer will vary with each person. It depends on your interest, depends on your aptitude, depends on whether you are an academic type or not, depends whether you want to start getting experience, and then you can build up based on that, and study, and gain further education and qualification later on.”
Every parent would like their child to succeed in life and a good education has always been viewed as a passport to latter successes in life.
The question then is: what should your child be studying?
Prime Minister Lee’s comments contained two key words that provide a good guide in helping parents mentor their children on what they should pursue in their lives and consequently the knowledge and skills that they should acquire to support these pursuits: interest and aptitude.
If our children pursue fields in which they have interests in but do not possess the innate aptitude or talents for them, then they would not go very far and their interests should at best remain as their recreations.
On the other hand, if our children pursue what they are talented at but have limited interests, then perhaps they need to change their mind-sets. Otherwise they may end up to be successful to some extend but live largely unfulfilled lives. If they cannot change their mind-sets, then they should explore something else where they have both the interests and the talents.
In their early growing-up years, it would be important to expose your children to a variety of experiences and subject matters to help them discover their interests. Overtime, their interests and dominant strengths would surface.
There are many well-developed psychometric assessment tools that are useful to help your children to discover their dominant strengths. My personal favourite tool is the Gallup StrengthsFinder. Every child is born with their own unique strengths that are not likely to change drastically over time after a certain age. Helping your children to discover their strengths are important to help them to focus, an important ingredient for success.
When our children are able to do what they love and what they are good at every day, they are more likely to grow up to be confident, fulfilled and productivity adults.
How often have we heard of seemingly successful professionals such as lawyers and doctors making drastic mid-career changes to pursue second careers that have little to do with their past educations and experiences? It turns out that a number of these individuals where in actual fact trying to fulfill their parents’ dreams rather than their own. It is not surprising that at some points, they will experience burnouts or disillusions.
Our role as parents is to help our children to discover their own uniqueness rather than carrying on our own dreams or helping to fulfill our own unrealized dreams.
What about the current job market? What if our children have very niche pursuits with limited opportunities in Singapore?
The answer again lies in what has already been mentioned. We are most productive when we do what we love and what we are best at. While there is a need to be aware and even adapt to the changing macro-environment, our children should not even attempt to become who they are obviously not for the sole reason of pursuing current job opportunities. Otherwise, they will ultimately be added to the unhappy “leakages” statistics.
The world today is a global village especially with the help of advanced and simple to use communications technologies. Opportunities are aplenty beyond our shores should your child’s interest be so niche that limited prospects are available in Singapore.
Besides focusing on acquiring the in-depth knowledge in the fields that match both their interests and strengths, there are other broad areas of knowledge and life-skills which in my view are necessary to support the success of our children. While they do not need to become specialists in these areas if these are not their chosen fields to focus on, our children should at least acquire fundamental understanding and competencies in areas such as accounting and financial literacy, negotiation skills, ethics and social responsibilities, business law, communications, public speaking, health and nutrition among others. These knowledge and skills can be acquired through a broad variety of channels such as workshops and conferences, books, videos, clubs and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) where free educational materials and videos are made available through the internet by providers as Coursera and a number of top universities.
One of the recent developments in the education scene in Singapore that I am particularly delighted with is seeing the implementation of one of the recommendations by The Applied Study in Polytechnics and ITE Review (Aspire) committee: better career guidance for students, which in my opinion is long over-due.
The Ministry of Education is gearing up this capability through training career guidance counselors who will be supporting this initiative starting from the Secondary Schools onward. The Republic Polytechnic has also recently launched a Specialists Diploma in Career Guidance to train a pool of course counselors. These developments are absolutely in the right direction for the benefit of our young people.
However, we need to remember that the people who will have the greatest and most lasting impact on these young people are their parents. As parents, we need to take the personal responsibility and ownership to mentor our children to become who they are uniquely wired to be. And not what we would like them to become.
There can be no better substitutes to our commitments as parents to mould our children in the way they should go.
“Train up a child in the way he should go [and in keeping with his individual gift or bent], and when he is old he will not depart from it.” – Proverbs 22:6 Amplified Bible (AMP)