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today • Saturday 29 June 2013

With the partnerships we forged with local training vendors here, the people who train here will get an opportunity to be exposed to the faster growing markets and the issues that leaders face in Asia.Mr John NolanUnilever’s senior vice-President for HUman resoUrces for Global markets

lee Yen neeleeyennee@mediacorp.com.sg

SINGAPORE — The Republic’s ambition to be a hub for training high-quality talent took a step forward yesterday with the opening of an S$80 million global leadership development centre by consumer goods giant Unilever.

Officiating at the opening, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said that the facility, named Four Acres, com-plements the Home for Talent initia-tive, a strategy by the Economic De-velopment Board (EDB) to make the country a place for companies to man-age and develop talent to drive growth in Asia.

“Basing Four Acres here makes

Facility, named Four Acres, is the MNC’s first such centre outside the United Kingdom

complementing ‘home for talent’ initiative

sense for both Unilever and Singa-pore. To Unilever, we like to think that it enables (the firm) to take advantage of our talent development ecosystem and capabilities … and helps (it) to groom leaders who will seize the op-portunities in emerging regional mar-kets,” said Mr Lee.

“To Singapore, it also makes sense because Four Acres complements our Home for Talent initiative,” he added.

Unilever’s leadership development campus, located at Nepal Hill at one-north, is its first such centre outside the United Kingdom. The decision to base the campus in Asia reflects Unilever’s strategy to grow its business in devel-oping and emerging markets, which now account for more than 55 per cent of its global revenue, said Unilever’s Chief Executive Officer Paul Polman.

The company aims to double the size of its business by 2020, and the bulk of the growth will be driven by sales in developing markets.

“Singapore sits at the nexus of the developed and emerging world. It’s a leading hub for leadership and inno-vation, and a gateway to the rapidly growing Asian economies. When our future leaders come here … we know they will gain exposure to new insights and perspectives,” said Mr Polman.

Four Acres in Singapore will deliver more than half of the 90 global lead-ership development courses Unilever plans to conduct globally every year. Between the campuses in Singapore and London, the programmes will train close to 3,000 employees annually.

Some of these courses will be con-

ducted in cooperation with education-al institutions here such as the Sin-gapore Management University and Human Capital Leadership Institute.

“With the partnerships we forged with local training vendors here, the people who train here will get an op-portunity to be exposed to the fast-er-growing markets and the issues that leaders face in Asia. I think that will provide them with a unique ex-perience that they probably couldn’t get if they were in London,” Unilev-er’s Senior Vice-President for Human Resources for Global Markets John Nolan told TODAY.

New initiative to help quickly fill job vacancies at VWOskok XinG HUixinghui@mediacorp.com.sg

SINGAPORE — To ease the manpower shortage faced by the social service sector, the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) is looking to recruit 15 social service profession-als who can be deployed quickly to vol-untary welfare organisations (VWOs).

This is part of the Government’s ef-fort to centrally manage social service talents, who could be posted to VWOs facing difficulty recruiting fast enough to start up or expand key Govern-ment-funded programmes.

Such innovative solutions are nec-essary to “overcome these manpow-er challenges in a labour market with many competing careers”, said Dep-uty Prime Minister and Minister for Finance Tharman Shanmugaratnam yesterday at the official opening of the Social Service Institute.

The programme the MSF is explor-ing is part of an initiative to create “a two-way flow” of social service pro-fessionals between the ministry and VWOs. Apart from recruiting staff

who can be posted to VWOs, the MSF will also open up opportunities for VWO staff to be attached to the min-istry itself. Details of the programmes are still being worked on, said an MSF spokesperson.

The ministry will also take nine so-cial work trainees under its wing next month under the Professional Conver-sion Programme for Social Workers supported by the Singapore Work-force Development Agency (WDA).

These are trainees assessed to be suitable for the UniSIM Accelerated Bachelor in Social Work or Graduate

Diploma in Social Work, but are not yet matched with an employer. The trainees will be attached to the minis-try and be supervised by experienced social workers, then placed into social service jobs upon graduation.

Mr Tharman stressed that al-though the Government is doing more to promote a fair and inclusive society through social and economic policies, the solution to low incomes and inequality does not only lie in sup-porting incomes through government transfers or other policy moves. It also takes people with the passion and skill to help others, he said.

“The social service profession is more important today than it has ever been. It is at the core of our collective effort to build a better Singapore,” the minister said.

As of last month, there are 1,400 registered social workers and social service practitioners. Faced with an ageing population, more are required. For example, demand for manpower in the elderly and disability service sub-sectors — such as in senior group homes, senior care centres and homes

for adults with disability — is expect-ed to rise by 30 per cent by 2016.

To ramp up supply of social serv-ice professionals, the institute’s new premises at TripleOne Somerset will help expand its training role with 34 new and enhanced courses — some with Workforce Skills Qualifications.

A new career centre will also help attract and retain talent, while provid-ing career guidance and placement. It aims to place 1,900 new entrants — in-cluding mid-career switchers — into the social service sector in the next three years. Opened last month, the centre has attracted more than 100 in-terested job seekers since. The WDA will co-fund the training of Singapore-ans and operations of the career cen-tre with a grant of up to S$28 million over three years.

To pay competitive wages, the ministry and the National Council of Social Service introduced salary benchmarking for key professions in the sector. The adjustment, which happened last year, saw more than 85 per cent of MSF-funded VWOs raising the salaries of their staff by a median of 8 per cent. The next bench-marking exercise will happen in one to two years.

Mr Tharman touring the Social Service Institute’s Resource Hub yesterday. PHoto: national coUncil

of social service

Mr Lee speaking to Unilever staff during his tour of Four Acres yesterday. PHoto: Unilever

Unilever opens S$80m leadership training centre