SINGAPORE: An episode of CNA’s Deep Dive podcast from earlier this week tackled the issue of jobs in Singapore. While Professor Sumit Agarwal from the National University of Singapore and country manager for recruitment firm Quess Singapore, Karen Teo, explained that while offshoring and AI can be seen as threats to Singaporeans’ jobs, another perspective is to see this as an opportunity to create higher-value jobs, as well as for AI to improve the way people work.

When hosts Steven Chia and Tiffany mentioned Yeo’s and Tiger Beer, saying that some roles in Singapore had been relocated to operations overseas to places such as Malaysia and Vietnam, the guests explained that the key reasons are cost-saving and regional integration.

Work that is low-cost, space and labour-intensive, such as breweries, is likely to relocate, given how expensive real estate is in Singapore.

“So you want to move those things where labour is cheaper, especially low-end labour or mid-end labor, and land is abundant or cheaper, right? And that’s the strategic decisions companies have been making on where and how what to move at this point,” the professor said.

Ms Yeo pointed out, meanwhile, that this is not a new phenomenon, and that offshoring jobs has been happening over the past decade. Even data centres, she added, are being set up in Malaysia, as Singapore does not have the space for them.

However, while shared service roles such as customer care, HR, and marketing are also likely to be relocated outside of Singapore, higher-value jobs are still retained in the city-state.

The guests explained that these are leadership, project management, and specialist roles, and Singapore’s environment of efficiency, high compliance, rule of law, and credibility remains attractive.

Prof Sumit also gave the example of roles in Research and Development (R&D) as being hard to move away from Singapore.

“For that, you need extremely high talent, and you cannot pay those kinds of salaries for people living in Malaysia or in Vietnam. They will be just so out of whack for the average distribution of salaries there… and so those people want to come here. Talented people whom you want to att...