The SkillsFuture initiative is a key feature of the government’s attempt to make lifelong upgrading a thing amongst Singaporeans.
Under the scheme, all citizens aged 25 and above have been given $500 worth of SkillsFuture credits. This credit can be spent on SkillsFuture-approved education and training courses.
The range of courses on offer is very wide, and there’s also a huge variety of course providers, from educational institutions like local universities, polytechnics, and ITEs to online course providers like Udemy.
You may be thinking yay, free money to upgrade myself! But the reality is that many have no idea how it can actually be used.
According to the stats, only about 12 per cent of all Singaporeans only have used their SkillsFuture Credit over the last 2 years, since the scheme started in Jan 2016.
If you still have credit left in your account, here are some interesting courses that caught our eye that you can sign up to upskill yourself because remember it’s up to you to ensure you’re employable should anything untoward happen at your current workplace:
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Text: Joanne Poh, MoneySmart / Additional reporting: Natalya Molok
Intimidated by all those hoity-toity cooking classes conducted by chefs? Then you might benefit from taking a basic cooking course. Shatec runs classes that will have you learning to prepare Chinese, Malay and Indian, amongst other types of cuisine. If you’re ambitious, you might even want to enrol in a WSQ certificate course, which can be paid for using your SkillsFuture credit.
Mandarin is a useful language to have in your back pocket no matter what country you’re in these days. Amongst the many courses that can be paid for with SkillsFuture credit are language classes in Basic Chinese and Business Chinese. While that’s not going to turn you into Confucius overnight, you’ll probably learn enough to order food at a hawker centre.
Have you ever wanted to start a blog showcasing your colourful fashion sense but were held back by your lack of photoshop skills? Or maybe you want to make your holiday photos to Johor look more like Japan. You, my friend, need some Photoshop skills. If you hate watching instructional videos on YouTube or just want to be spoon-fed, then we really recommend that you just enrol yourself in a Photoshop class using your SkillsFuture credit. The readers of your blog will thank you for it.
So you’re a hardcore clubber and now you want to take things to the next step — by making the club your workplace. Well, believe it or not, there’s a WDA-approved course taught by Ah-Ha! Events Academy designed to help budding DJs master mixing basics. With just the basics, you would probably already know enough to moonlight as a DJ at Thai discos and the like, though we’re not suggesting you do that.
School yourself in the fine art of Ikebana or Japanese flower arrangement, courtesy of your SkillsFuture credit. You might not be looking for a career in the florist industry or as an interior decorator, but hey at least you’ll have a nice home and be a really sought-after housewife or house husband.
Licensed tour guides in Singapore can earn quite a generous amount in exchange for taking tourists around and telling them about the various sights on the island. Even if you don’t actually end up becoming a guide, the course will have you reading up on Singapore history and learning about many lesser-known attractions in town, which doesn’t sound like such a bad thing.
Even if you’re not a web developer, you might occasionally find yourself having to make basic website modifications. This one-day course will give you a working knowledge of HTML5 and CSS3, which are the building blocks of websites, and enable you to build simple sites or make basic modifications on an existing site.
Obviously, a 14-hour course is not going to make a data scientist out of you. But if you’ve already got some tech skills and want an introduction to how to use Python (a scripting language) to manipulate, model and visualise data, this course might help.