The nature of employability skills: empirical evidence from Singapore

This paper concerns the changing nature of employability skills, moving from the original life skills or basic skills concepts to the increasingly work-oriented interpretation. The early concept of employability skills linked employability skills to job readiness and holding down employment. However, the work-oriented focus is increasingly linking the impact of employability skills to organizational (or performance) outcomes, which in turn are linked to workers' career mobility and wage gains. This paper makes use of recent skills utilization data in Singapore to map out the relationship between employability skills and mobility. It shows that employability skills in Singapore are increasingly job context related, going beyond just holding down a job. As such, mobility is likely to be influenced by the extent to which employability skills are shared between industries. Recognition of the context-related nature of employability skills has led to the modification of workforce development training in Singapore in order to meet the needs for greater employability skills effectiveness through 'contextualized' training provision.