Hello, I’m back with another blogpost, and this time it isn’t about a website but a programme!!! Wew I’m kinda nervous. Yeehui asked me to talk share my thoughts around Hatch to Hire... haha, so here they are.

I would say it’s a very weird feeling, which I don’t know how to explain. There are too many feelings tied to it. Unemployment to be exact. This unemployment doesn’t have to necessarily tied to a fresh grad or to career switchers - it can be a PWD, a person who just came out of prison, a person who doesn’t have a ‘proper’ education.

As kids or as teenagers, I don’t think we understand the importance of work, a job, a career… what it all means. Is it really that important to plan ahead? To know what exactly I want, or to just try to get all my studies done and find a full time job because that’s what everyone expects? I guess everybody has an invisible standard: for employees - who they want to work for, and for employers - who to work for them.

You probably have seen the news, about fresh grads expecting their monthly starting pay to be 8-10k or about AI reducing and replacing jobs in graphic design and art. Employers tout unrealistic job experience for a person who just graduated. Let’s not even talk about qualifications - those are just an entrance ticket to get past “AI” filtering process.

(OMG I hope I don’t get cancelled.)

I don’t think that the current education system is helping with this. It often focuses too much on academics, not so much preparing students for real “adult life”. I don’t mean that school should teach us how to pass an interview or write a resume. But perhaps it could help us explore big questions like how we should choose and build our career? Things like that.

Something that stuck with me was a conversation with my colleague who interviewed a candidate who planned to join a government after his internship ended. When asked why, he said it’s because his parents told him it was an “iron rice bowl”. There’s nothing wrong with that, but how sad is it to have society choose your career for you rather than yourself - will you really be happy?

Let’s look at our employers - chasing the trend of AI, trying to find the perfect match for their company by having unrealistically high expectations in their job descriptions. I don’t blame them for that - I guess it just a filtering process to see whether someone is confident enough to push themselves to try for a role. It comes back to one question: Are we doing enough to prepare for this?

Look at these numbers from the Straits Times:

• Singapore’s youth (15–24) unemployment rate is 6.6%, low by world standards

• 88.9% of uni grads find a job within 6 months, but only 74.4% of these are full-time permanent roles

• Only 54.2% of poly grads have full-time permanent roles

• Poly grads with no job after 6 months more than doubled, from 4.2% (2023) to 10.0% (2025)

• Private-uni grads: only 46.4% are in full-time work. They earn about $1,000 less than local-uni grads.

• Only 31.5% of jobs accept people with no experience

• 1 in 3 young people (15–35) report serious stress, anxiety or depression symptoms

And let’s not even get into people who went for upskilling courses, work skills diplomas and still don’t find a job after that.

Okay I should stop, I feel like I can go forever and ever with the anger I have towards the whole system and all the small little things that add up together.

As a person who’s helping out with our new apprenticeship programme, I feel incredibly proud of how much effort we put in on both the employer and employee’s side. It’s a bet honestly - students don’t need to pay anything unless we land them a job with a monthly salary of 3.3k and above. This means that we bet that our apprentice will find success in their career, and we’ll put in 100% of our effort to make both it work for both employers and employees.

If you are reading this and you want to learn more about Hatch to Hire, you can email me or head over here for more information.

SEE YOU NEXT TIME!