How would you envision your career journey? For some, it may mean rising through the same organisation. For others, it could involve moving across firms and industries to gain new skills, broaden networks and explore different pathways.
This is the essence of career mobility. It is not just hierarchical advancement but involves leveraging available opportunities to allow employees to develop new skills while broadening their knowledge and professional connections. The workplace that emerged from Covid-19 is very different from the one that entered it. New technologies such as artificial intelligence are reshaping industries, while employees are more conscious of opportunities for development, flexibility and meaningful progression.
The Government and its tripartite partners have taken a proactive stance to meet these developments. From the SkillsFuture Movement that began over a decade ago to the launch of the Career Health SG initiative earlier in 2025, they have been actively promoting labour market developments to support Singaporeans in taking ownership of their career mobility and aspirations.
For both employers and employees, this changing landscape presents challenges and opportunities. To remain competitive, Singapore needs to find better ways to assess how well our organisations create opportunities for career growth. For this, we would suggest an index that measures precisely that – one we helped create.
Mapping career mobility
To sustain career mobility, employees must continue to develop skills relevant to changing business needs. However, the responsibility doesn't fall on employees alone. Employers also play a central role: creating pathways for growth, fostering a culture of learning, and providing chances for staff to move across roles and functions.
Companies that fail to do this risk losing talent. HR policies that support intra-organisational mobility such as secondments, internal job rotations or leadership development tracks are useful, but mean little if employees cannot access them. Without clear, standardised metrics, firms risk underinvesting in workforce development because the benefits are hard to quantify. This is where metrics matter. Business leaders need insights into how their hiring, training and promotion practices compare with others, or where their greatest opportunities for improvement exist.
Learning from global models
One way to measure opportunity is through an index constituting objective indicators that capture how employers create career pathways. In the United States, the American Opportunity Index developed by the Burning Glass Institute, Harvard Business School and Schultz Family Foundation measures how well large firms drive economic mobility and positive career outcomes for their employees.
W. W. Grainger, an industrial supply company, shows how investing in human capital can go hand in hand with organisational success. Its holistic approach combined with executive-led development initiatives, structured learning programmes, and clear career pathways led to 69 per cent workforce participation in skill development, while building robust and strong talent pipelines across all levels. These efforts helped the firm rise from third to first place in the American Opportunity Index rankings in 2024.
Singapore can learn from these experiences. A well-designed Singaporean version of the index, derived from administrative data, may have the same impact of not only empowering our workforce but also leading our businesses to greater successes.
So how is the Singapore Opportunity Index different?
To start with, it is distinct from its American and British counterparts. Our labour market is smaller with a tighter pool of skills and different demographic realities. By drawing on high-quality administrative data and covering a wider spectrum of firms, the Singapore Opportunity Index (SOI) can offer a more accurate and comprehensive picture of opportunities here. The SOI can be invaluable to policymakers, employers and, most importantly, employees. Clearer insights into the employment landscape can motivate workers to take greater ownership of their careers, spurring them to upgrade skills and pursue new pathways.
Notwithstanding its utility, a caveat is necessary. While the SOI could be a powerful tool, it is important not to place more weight on it than it was designed to carry. No single number can capture the full complexity of workforce development. As Singapore's economy grows more advanced, we will need accurate and detailed information to track whether policies are delivering results. We must also be mindful of the limits of any indicator.
Any indicator with some utility will have to contend with overuse, misuse or worse. The unemployment rate is a useful reminder. It is widely cited because it is simple and comparable across time and countries. Yet it gives only a narrow view of labour market health, missing out on issues such as underemployment or quality of jobs. The same standards are applicable to any other indicator that purports to summarise the state of any aspect of the labour market.
Some firms may worry that being ranked could affect their ability to attract talent in a tight labour market. But greater transparency ultimately helps everyone. Over time, the SOI can give employers a clearer perspective on long-term workforce challenges, while offering employees and policymakers a more complete picture of opportunities and gaps.
Potential uses
At its core, the SOI is built on five broad metrics: pay, progression, parity, retention and hiring. Each carries equal weight, reflecting what matters most to employees and job seekers. Together, they allow us to compare firms not only against one another, but also to dig deeper into specific patterns and trends.
Take hiring as an example. The SOI can show how open firms are to candidates without degrees or with less than three years of experience. This can shed light on important questions: Where do such opportunities actually lie, and do they differ by firm size? Conventional wisdom suggests larger firms are always the safer bet – but the data may show otherwise.
In addition, it would be interesting to see whether hiring opportunities are similar for similar-sized firms throughout all industry sectors. As the firms in the SOI are grouped according to the usual broad industry sectors and by whether the number of resident employees is at least 200, it would be possible to examine the patterns in hiring opportunities within these sub-groups. It could turn out, for instance, that hiring opportunities are better with smaller firms than larger ones in certain industry sectors.Ultimately, the real value of the SOI is not in producing another league table, but in sparking collective action. By making opportunities more visible, it can encourage workers to invest in their own growth, spur firms to strengthen career pathways, and give policymakers sharper tools to close gaps in the labour market. Used wisely, the SOI can help align the aspirations of employees, the strategies of employers and the priorities of government. That alignment is what will keep Singapore's workforce competitive, resilient and ready for the future.
Associate Professor Randolph Tan, Dr Sheryl Chua and Associate Professor Kang Soon-Hock from the Singapore University of Social Sciences collaborated with the Burning Glass Institute and the Ministry of Manpower on the Singapore Opportunity Index. The index was officially launched on Oct 14 2025.