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Jessica Tan – Enhancing Senior Employability


Empowering Singaporeans to lead happy and fulfilling lives through meaningful employment is something I feel strongly about. And for this cause, my team and I are committed to driving senior employability - enabling opportunities for our seniors to enrich their golden years and for Singapore to tap into the potential and experience of our seniors.

The motivation for this advocacy:
i.       By 2030, 1 in 4 Singaporeans will be aged 65 and above
ii.      Average life expectancy in Singapore today has risen to about 85 years old
iii.     Prevalence of a multigenerational workforce in most companies

Currently, there is a myriad of re-employment, retirement, and retention policies, financial support and grants to employ seniors, programmes to re-design work, as well as various initiatives to hire and support seniors who want to continue to work.

In order to better understand and learn more about what matters to our seniors in terms of employment, we partnered with educational and healthcare institutions, human resource practitioners, and community groups to reach out to seniors through focus group discussions, dialogues, and surveys. We also examined senior employability with employers and heard the perspectives of younger workers who work with seniors.

These findings from focus group discussions and surveys guided us as we made recommendations on employment policies to enable meaningful employment of seniors. This will help businesses and Singapore realise the potential of the talent pool of seniors.

In October 2022, I presented these findings in Parliament when I raised the Adjournment Motion on senior employability. I recommended a re-think of working and learning in the workforce, through structural changes in how we learn and how work is organised; as well as the need to better support a multi-generational workforce.

In PAP Women's Wing, we invest in all Singaporeans, not just at the beginning, but at every phase throughout their lives. We will continue to engage more stakeholders and organisations as we further refine the recommendations and empower our seniors to live happy and fulfilling lives!
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Women Branch Chair

Jessica Tan Soon Neo - Changi Simei Branch
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Beneficiaries

Persons aged 50 years and older and who would like to continue working
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When

Nov 2021 - Oct 2022
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Frequency

On-going
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Pillar(s)

Empower
Equip