GovTech lets go of 38 staff members in second round of layoffs

This includes career coaching, job matching and placement assistance.

All affected staff members were informed by the end of Thursday.

This was the second of three rounds of retrenchment, as GovTech seeks to let go of 7 to 9 per cent of its workforce amid a transition to a new operating model. The exercise affects staff deployed to 23 government agencies.

CNA understands that the final round will be done in mid-2027, and that staff were told about this in a company-wide townhall last month.

In the first phase which took place in July this year, 93 officers were retrenched.

The figures mean that nearly 170 staff members could be let go in that final round – the highest number of all three phases.

The statutory board under the Ministry of Digital Development and Information had about 3,900 permanent and contract staff, supporting the technology needs of more than 50 government agencies.

News of GovTech’s retrenchment exercise drew attention as public sector layoffs in Singapore are rare.

Before GovTech, the last publicly reported retrenchments in the civil service dated back to 2006 to 2010, when 20 officers left under the Special Resignation Scheme, according to a written parliamentary reply in November 2011 by then-Deputy Prime Minister and Minister-in-charge of the Civil Service Teo Chee Hean.

Back in July, GovTech chairman Chng Kai Fong said in a note to staff that the move was “not an AI-driven downsizing exercise” and that the shift began years before the current AI wave.

In August, Acting Manpower Minister Jasmin Lau said in parliament that the agency had anticipated the need to reshape its workforce and invested heavily in pilots and apprenticeships to retrain or redeploy staff. However, there were limits to its pace and scale, said the Minister-in-charge of GovTech.