How National Trades Union Congress (NTUC) Learning Hub is helping Singaporean workers expand their knowledge and horizons

The company

The National Trades Union Congress (NUTC) is a national confederation of trade unions incorporating a network of professional associations and partners across all sectors in Singapore.

With over one million members, it comprises 59 affiliated trade unions, five affiliated trade associations, 12 social enterprises, and is the sole national trade union centre in Singapore.

With the NTUC’s mission to ultimately help Singapore stay competitive and to ensure their workers stay employable for life, NTUC (through its learning enterprise, LHUB) struck up a partnership with Go1 launching free learning in April 2020, to provide training to any Singaporean worker in response to COVID-19.

The challenge

As a country, Singapore has a very strong learning culture. This is supported by a number of government programs that actively encourage Singaporeans to reskill and be prepared for the advent of Industry 4.0. However, learning and development has been traditionally viewed as being face-to-face or through one of the many Institutes of Higher Learning .

When considering online training, there were two main questions that arose - would the workforce adopt online learning that was in short bite-sized pieces, and would they connect with the variety of content from a range of providers?

With the country not being an exception to the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak, NTUC LearningHub had a challenge ahead of them in keeping the country’s workforce engaged and in supporting them remotely through the period.

The solution

In response to the COVID-19 situation, Singapore launched their Circuit Breaker period. Go1 and NTUC LearningHub curated a number of off-the-shelf courses aligning with the NTUC ‘Worker 4.0’ framework which highlights the needs of workers of the future - adaptive, technological and technical skills.

The library of courses offered on the platform included topics such as Change Management, Business Management, Leadership and Innovation as well as Data Analytics, Python Coding and the Adobe Suite courses.

With the platform allowing for personalised recommendations and trackable learning, Singapore’s learners are able to self sign up, self enrol into courses, and independently track and record their learning.

The results

In just under two months, 85,000 workers from a broad range of industry sectors and backgrounds self registered to the LHUB Portal. Success measures were set at 7,500 users, which was achieved within a week of launch.

Over 20 million minutes of learning was conducted in these two months, equating to almost four hours of online learning per registered user. The most popular courses included Emotional Intelligence, Communication Skills, Digital Marketing and Microsoft Excel. With these extremely positive numbers, significant insights were provided back to NUTC around the learning interests and engagement of the country’s workforce.

“NTUC LearningHub is spurring Singaporeans to learn any time, anywhere, and on any device by going the extra mile with this initiative. Go1 stands ready to help Singaporeans by working with NTUC LearningHub to offer this suite of free courses. This is an example of how people’s needs, especially in times of distress, take centre stage.

Singapore continues to display solidarity through its nationwide support and schemes, while local communities have shown acts of kindness through the countless charitable work towards the needy. Go1 is extremely proud to partner with NTUC LearningHub and we look forward to a long term and successful partnership,” says Go1 co-founder Vu Tran.

“We believe that learning should never stop, so we remain committed to driving Singapore’s workforce forward in our transformation journey, especially through changing times. Our mission to make learning accessible to all workers has never been so pertinent and urgent than in the present,” says NTUC LHUB CEO Kwek Kok Kwong.

Looking towards the future, LHUB have now created their own new brand LHUB GO which will be used for phase 2. This phase will provide 200 curated courses to those who have union membership. These courses provide employer-coveted skill sets such as Leadership and Adaptability as well as Data Analytics, further supplementing the learning needs of workers. Go1 Playlists and Awards will be used during this phase, before finally offering the Content Hub.