BANGKOK – With global hiring for entry-level roles falling due to disruption by artificial intelligence, governments will have to partner the private sector to encourage the hiring of fresh graduates, said President Tharman Shanmugaratnam on Oct 12.
Tertiary education systems must also shift their academic focus towards applied learning through work-study programmes, attachments and internships, he added.
President Tharman was speaking during a panel discussion on AI and jobs on the sidelines of the annual International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank Group (WBG) meetings in Bangkok.
The discussion, which also involved IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva and World Bank Group president Ajay Banga, focused on how developing countries can harness small AI – affordable applications built for local languages, infrastructure and budgets – to drive growth and employment.
Noting that the advent of AI was in its early days, President Tharman, who is co-chair of the WBG’s High-Level Advisory Council on Jobs, said: “This is not a one-off shock. This is a whole new era.”
While economic growth remains critical to securing good jobs, growth alone will no longer be sufficient, as shown by the weak job creation in countries such as China and India, which are growing quite well, he noted.
AI will widen this divergence between growth and job creation if the world is too passive about how it deals with the technology, he added.
“We’ve got to do everything we can to, first, use AI to create good jobs, and second, to create jobs that can be done well by humans despite AI,” he said.
An urgent task is for governments to address the issue of disappearing “first-rung” employment – the entry-level jobs where fresh graduates traditionally gain experience.
Such jobs have been declining, particularly in the most AI-exposed sectors such as technology and across other sectors, said President Tharman.
He urged governments to work with the private sector to ensure fresh graduates can land their first job and build a pathway to a career ladder.
These will have to be structural measures rather than temporary crisis responses like those rolled out during the Covid-19 pandemic and the Global Financial Crisis, he said.
Such public-private collaboration should give fresh graduates the first foothold in the labour market, where they can learn on the job.
“We can’t afford to lose that. Because if you lose that, and a cohort of young people waits, say, a year before getting a job, you are not only then competing with the next cohort the following year, you also lose skills, you lose intangible aptitudes, and you lose trust in the future,” he said.
At the same time, universities and tertiary institutions, which are now “overwhelmingly academically focused”, will have to adapt to the shifts in the workplace.
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