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Every morning, as the staff bus takes Mr Thaddeus Chew and his colleagues across the Sentosa Gateway to the island, the speed limit drops to 50kmh. Mr Chew has experienced it more than a thousand times, and still, each time, he feels a quiet sense of anticipation as the island comes into view.
“It puts you in a good place to start the day,” he says.
As senior assistant director in the experience development division at Sentosa Development Corporation (SDC), Mr Chew is helping to determine what the island will look like for the next generation – a task that requires thinking not in quarters or years, but in decades.
The 38-year-old is one of the key figures in SDC’s work on the Greater Sentosa Master Plan, a long-horizon effort to integrate Sentosa and Brani Island into an elevated leisure destination.
“We are not just planning for today,” he says. “We are envisioning what’s to come for the next 20 to 30 years for the new Sentosa.”
This kind of visionary planning, Mr Chew reflects, is possible only because of the breadth of experience he has accumulated across his 14 years at SDC. A marketing graduate, he joined in 2011, drawn by a passion for tourism, and has since moved through six job rotations in the company, spanning strategy, business and project management.
“The perspectives you gain are so different,” he says of his job rotations. “Understanding what keeps the operations team up at night, versus how to develop strategies at a broader level, is the kind of exposure that shapes how you think.”
A stint at subsidiary Mount Faber Leisure Group (MFLG) gave him a commercial operator’s perspective. There, he oversaw projects from concept to construction, including SkyHelix Sentosa and the Central Beach Bazaar, both part of Sentosa’s wider offering, which attracts millions of visitors each year.
