Public servants upskill to become ‘citizen developers’
SINGAPORE: Imagine spending the bulk of your working hours copying and pasting lines from different documents into spreadsheets.

Then suppose that the data lands in various templates, in varying measures, making your task a recurring nightmare.

Add to that the thought that you have no leverage to demand that senders – your peers in sister organisations, in fact – reformat their information.

Each day, you swallow the dump on you. Each month, you endure the same misery. Over and over.

If that sounds familiar to corporate back-office teams, it is just another day at Vital, the back-of-house agency of the government.

Set up in 2006, the agency provides human resources (HR), payroll, finance and procurement services to 100 public agencies and over 100,000 public officers.

But over the past four years, this hardly known body has been edging into the limelight, winning awards for shared services and HR, even appearing at a Las Vegas tech conference to talk about its automation experience.

Tapping the advent of low or no-code programming, it is in the midst of turning its 500 workers into what its chief executive Dennis Lui calls “citizen developers”.

Its strategy is to arm its staff with the technological savvy, software and the power to create or improve their own business processes.

The impending death of the traditional backroom job hit Lui when he took on the role in 2020.

To begin with, most of his colleagues were unplaced on the degree-holder track in the civil service, which paid better salaries.

“My worry was whether they could keep up with the times and, as our work became more automated over time, whether the employees could continue to work the same old way,” he said in an interview with The Straits Times.

To master the technology, not only did his colleagues have to learn maths and data analytics, but they also had to know robotic automation software like UiPath and programming languages like Python.

It found a training provider in Ngee Ann Polytechnic, which customised for it two courses that lead to a certificate or a higher-level specialist diploma in data analytics.

To encourage take-up, Vital allowed its workers to attend the courses during work hours. It also paid for them.

“We were very upfront: We want you to upskill, we want you to learn, we want you to be trained,” said Lui.

“We will send you on our time, on our cost. Please get it done.” — The Straits Times/ANN
Corporate News
SINGAPORE: Imagine spending the bulk of your working hours copying and pasting lines from different documents into spreadsheets.