SINGAPORE: Creative skills are becoming a requirement for jobs not traditionally part of the creative sector, a report by SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG) has found.
The latest edition of the annual skills report found that seven out of 10 non-creative job roles need creative skills.
For example, software developers need to understand design to make apps that are user friendly. Restaurant managers also need skills in branding and attracting customers, beyond running the restaurant, said SSG in a press release on Wednesday (Jan 22).
According to the report, 40 creative skills have become more transferable since 2019, which indicates that more job roles are increasingly asking for creative skills.
There are about 150,000 creative professionals in Singapore, and one-third of them work in companies in creative industries, said SSG in the press release. These include the performing arts, product design, media, architecture, as well as branding, advertising and marketing.
The other two-thirds take on creative roles in other companies, SSG’s report found.
Business, financial management and people management skills also remain in high demand for jobs in the creative industries, and the demand for skills related to operation excellence is rising, SSG noted.
The report explores a key question – the impact of artificial intelligence on creative industries, said Minister of State for Education Gan Siow Huang at the launch of the report on Wednesday.
“While GenAI tools can support creative work, it is also important to guide ethical use of these tools,” she added.
For the report, 87 creative professionals were polled on their attitudes towards generative artificial intelligence. About 85 per cent said such tools have an impact on their work, while 34.5 per cent felt negatively about the advancement of generative AI.
More than 50 per cent of those polled had used some form of generative AI tools in their work, the report said.
“Creative professionals emphasise the importance of applying human creativity and AI capabilities in a mutually reinforcing way,” said SSG in the press release.
“They expressed concerns over issues of ethics, intellectual property, and output quality related to generative AI use, which suggest that there could be emerging job roles, tasks or skills dedicated to addressing these concerns.”
TOOLS AND APPS
For its latest report, SSG studied data on more than 5,000 digital applications and tools between 2019 to 2023 to understand how they are used across job roles.
Apps and tools are “widely used” across many job roles today, and the list in the report provides a more complete understanding of what a worker needs for a job, SSG said.
Proficiency requirements for apps and tools were most often found in job postings for IT, engineering and operations roles, the report said.
The top 20 apps and tools in 2023 mainly comprised productivity tools, programming languages, as well as software designed for managing data, processes and projects, SSG said in the press release.
With “significant industry attention” on AI applications, SSG also studied the subset of the related apps and tools, such as Java, Python and Google Analytics, it said.
Proficiency requirements for apps and tools related to AI were found most often in job postings for roles in IT, engineering and research, the report found.
From 2019 to 2023, the four apps and tools in this category that grew the most in demand were Microsoft CRM, AWS Cloud9, Microsoft Azure and ServiceNow, SSG said.
“The upward movement of these AI-related apps and tools suggests that more employers are leveraging cloud services to enhance business processes,” the press release read.
NEW DASHBOARDS
Ms Gan also announced the launch of a new online portal to enhance access to data and insights on jobs and skills, which can be found here. Most of the data displayed on the dashboards come from job postings that are available online, as well as government data on the job market.
There are six dashboards available on the portal, including a skills and job mobility dashboard, which can be used to understand how different factors can be considered when exploring career transition opportunities.
SSG examined five factors that made career transitions viable based on 342 job roles that showed a strong growth in demand. The five factors are wage levels, the level of demand, how much demand has grown, how similar the skills are and historical transitions.
The job requirements dashboard allows users to explore the top skills, as well as the apps and tools required for a specific job role over the years.
