Is Singapore's internship/upskilling culture sustainable? |
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So I've just started my very first full-time job. I'm a fresh local university graduate working for a company which you probably know about. I doubt I accomplished anything remotely spectacular during my university days, nevertheless yours sincerely was fortunate enough to land a job that lets me take care of my aging parents and hopefully marry my girlfriend soon. It's near the end of internship recruiting season; I was casually chatting with my team over lunch. Suddenly my supervisor blurted, "Eh XXX, you know this candidate, dude possesses more YoE than you." I reckoned he's kidding, then he flashed his resume before my eyes.....leaving me absolutely floored. Said person attended the same school, even pursuing the same degree like myself. If I recall correctly, he had already completed two internships before matriculating, and during his first 2 years of university, had been plugging away at part-time ones all the while. He crushed my current company's interview with him too, breezing right through particularly advanced algorithmic and tech-based questions posed whose difficulties I'm most positive went way beyond whatever's being taught in conventional lectures. As expected, he got offered the role. Of late, Manpower Minister Mr Tan See Leng has been urging folks to focus more on exposure rather than pay. Indeed, I can see it happening right before my eyes now. But in the same vein, how is such an endeavor sustainable? Back then I really struggled with some of the more technical modules, often having to book 1-1 consultations with my various professors or rely on helpful classmates to untangle the knots. I'm assuming he is just some especially capable outlier, and probably took the initiative to, well, steamroll the competition. Thinking back to my time as an undergraduate, between part-time jobs and schoolwork, I can't imagine plausibly squeezing out any extra hours to manage what he did. I was just informed yesterday I'll be made his orientation buddy. He has since connected with me on LinkedIn, as well as sent a cogently thought-out list of questions - seeking advice regarding stuff to prepare for his first day, what tech stack we deploy etc. Frankly speaking, I'm feeling kind of intimidated. It seems the bar to simply keep one's head above water jobwise keeps rising. Past a certain point, only those endowed with exceptional ability or hailing from privileged backgrounds will ever snag top positions, thus further entrenching the skewed socioeconomic ladder. For those of us who are just average, what can we do? |
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