Our class has finally completed our last exam for the 6 months IBM AI (Artificial Intelligence) on Wed morning. There is a sense of accomplishment that a bunch of us mid-career folks had survived hundreds of hours of online classes, project submissions and exams. We have just graduated!! Yahoo!!
The government had created the Skillsfuture program since 2015 to help citizens and permanent residents upskill themselves in order to stay relevant to the fast-evolving and changing work landscape. New technologies have accelerated the redundancy of many old jobs where machines can easily take over at a fraction of the cost. Many iron rice bowls are no more and they recognised that all of us older workers needed a little help to pivot to a new and more promising industry.
I joined this Skillsfuture journey in July 2017 after leaving my last full-time job, looking to chart my next halftime path. The more I look, the more I realised that there were so many new skills to pick up which I could potentially be very interested in learning. My lifelong learning journey had thus begun 4 years ago.
https://www.myskillsfuture.gov.sg/content/portal/en/index.html
The first course I attended was a fun one which I took with a group of close friends: “The Science and Business of Wine”. It was a deep dive education into one of our favourite topics in life. We had enjoyed it during our work career and pick up bits and pieces of wine knowledge over the years. This course helped to fill in the missing pieces of that experience. Questions that we never asked or were too embarrassed to even say out loud were answered during the 2 months of classes. We also had a lot of fun too, enjoying the tasting of new wines and meeting new people. “Darling, I have to attend 3 hours of evening classes every Monday night to study and prepare for my exam!” And we tasted at least 3 bottles during every class. Simply heaven 😉
I soon discovered that the additional 90% subsidy for citizens above the age of 40 had no cap and was unlimited. One could theoretically do as many courses as he wants and only required to foot just 10% of the total course fees. I began to become more ambitious in signing up for courses that took my fancy. At about the same time, I happened to stumble into part-time consultancy work as my career had reached a stand still. This freed me up with a lot of time to dive deeper into my learning journey without a full time job.
I immediately signed up for a 1-year Specialist Diploma in Business Analytics that was conducted via night classes. As expected, I was one of the oldest uncle students in the class of 26 and not very tech inclined at all. I needed my younger teammates to help me at times, to figure out which buttons to push. But I managed to pass that and was rewarded in 2018 with a graduation ceremony in formal grad attire 12 months later.
This kickstarted a zealous moi on the lookout for more courses to sign up. By then, I had realized that I was very interested in knowing more about new technology like AI, Blockchain, Big Data and Cloud Computing. I did computer science a long time ago and hated it as an eighteen year old. But little did I know that my interest would return many year later as this area had moved ahead so much and accelerated even faster in recent years.
I strive to absorb as much as I can via this generous Skillsfuture subsidy and attended courses like Alibaba’s SIRS eRetail training in Hangzhou and Blockchain in Seoul. Along the way, I also did numerous courses in topics like aquaponics, reading financial statements, starting a small business and a few fintech related subjects.
These opened my eyes to the limitless possibilities that lies ahead. I am a pretty optimistic guy most of the time and I see more old job losses as opportunities for even more new tech jobs to be created. The main shortfall gap for me : how can I pave a path for myself to pivot into these new technologies?
By now, Skillsfuture had more than 25,000+ courses to choose from!! If you do a keyword search on a topic like photography, you will find more than 200+ courses you can sign up to. Thanks to Covid, the authorities have put aside even more financial resources to allow retrenched workers to upskill and pivot to new jobs.
This is where the SGUnited program was introduced late last year. It was a one time subsidy for unemployed people to become full time students for a period of time for them to pick up new skills. IBM started 2 tracks on AI and Cybersecurity that lasted for 6 months. To date, almost 1,000 students have graduated from this program.
https://webibmcourse.mybluemix.net/SGUnitedProgramme
The first batch of students started in Oct 2020 and I encouraged 2 of my friends to sign up. I hesitated initially as I was still doing some consultancy work in Myanmar. Eventually I decided to sign up in Feb 2021 as they had relaxed the unemployment requirement, allowing students to do part time work as long as it did not interfere with their studies.
The subsidy is generous as I only had to pay $500 (using my Skillsfuture funds) for the $20,000 school fees. On top of it all, I was paid $1,500 per month as a student allowance. My main concern was that we had to do the classes over Zoom due to Covid and becoming a full time student again. But we survived and finally graduated this week.
It has been an amazing experience for me as I fully immerse myself into technology for the last 6 months, studying hard for the modules and finishing projects and exams. We did an AI intro, followed by Enterprise Design Thinking, then Cloud Computing, Data Science and finally AI Practitioner. Most topics are taught via high level conceptualization without the need to do much programming. The projects did help me to better understand how AI works. I can now confidently conduct a more intelligent conversation on Deep Learning 😉
On the human aspect, our class cohort was made up of 21 persons initially. This decreased to 19 as 2 dropped out (found job and personal reasons) subsequently. The fact that the class only physically met once throughout the whole course was a first for me. All project discussions and classes were done via Zoom in the comfort of our homes. It was surreal that we had to fully adapt to utilizing our home Wifi to interact with classmates due to Covid.
Most of my classmates were around my age group with stagnant career paths, looking for something new to reinvent ourselves. A number of the ladies had left the rat race many years ago to raise a family and wanted to come back as the kids have grown. I was the only ex-evil banker in the group as most had an IT background. At times, group discussions were like chickens and ducks talking. Sometimes patience wear thin and resulted in some heated exchanges . But I guess we are all adult enough to resolve any conflicts in order to achieve our project goals.
As we near the finishing line of this program, we talk about having a final beer date to meet up and have a farewell drink up. But alas, it was not to be as the Delta wave hit us. At least some of us had lunch together after the first and only exam earlier in the course where we had to go to the exam center to take it.
We had our Telegram group chat from the beginning and shared a lot of jokes and irrelevant stuff as well as stuff related to the program. We also shared our worries and insecurities as we nevigated the new normal to try to pick up new skills to learn to pivot into new technologies. This is a one in a lifetime opportunity for us to reinvent ourselves at the courtesy of the taxpayers. It’s like taking back our tax dollars after contributing to the authorities for years, to the tune of 29k at one go 😉
I will look back to this episode of my life with fond memories, on how we adapted to using new technology to learn new technology and skills. It has further opened my eyes to the limitless possibilities AI can offer us. We are only limited by our imagination to create new solutions. This tech wave is accelerating and I intend to catch and ride on its coattail into the new beyond. My lifelong learning adevnture will continue as I plot my next phase of this intoxicating journey. Stay tuned.
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