Deputy Director (Workforce Programmes Division)

[What the role is]

You will be responsible for supporting the development and leading the implementation of operational policies and service delivery plans for programmes and services, targeted at individuals, ensuring it meets policy intent and outcomes.

[What you will be working on]

You are expected to fulfil a range of responsibilities, including:

• Designing, enhancing, implementing and reviewing partnership collaborations with agencies across the government, union, community and private sectors. This includes identifying and evaluating suitable partners based on specific segments and planned scope, curating partnership arrangements and securing necessary resources, and overseeing the implementation of formalised partnership agreements with due diligence.

• Managing and supervising the management of strategic partnerships and performance oversight of key institutional partners like NTUC’s Employment and Employability Institute (NTUC-e2i) and Career Matching Providers (CMPs), ensuring effective service delivery and partnership outcomes.

• Leading the implementation of funding support schemes and ensuring it meets policy intent, outcomes and proper grant governance. This includes developing business processes, mapping out workflows and standard operating procedures, ensuring operational-technological integration for the processes, putting in place robust grant management processes, communicating with and managing relevant stakeholders, monitoring and analysis of relevant data for the conduct of scheme effectiveness review.

• Working with internal stakeholders to manage the implementation of various operations and grants-related processes, and collaborating with these internal stakeholders for continuous review and improvement of the same processes.

• Managing individual and employer-facing appeals/feedback processes, including collaborating across agencies to craft and devise proper responses and potential operational resolution within stated service level agreements.

[What we are looking for]

The ideal candidate should possess the following skill sets:

• Leadership and team management: Capable of managing, developing and motivating a team of officers to consistently ideate, innovate and improvise on existing strategies and approaches, synergising cross-division efforts to achieve productivity and optimal impact, while fostering a productive work environment

• Critical thinking and problem-solving: Skilled in writing/preparing clear submissions/presentations and framing appropriate narratives to suit different target audiences to achieve communications objectives, analysing information to make inferences and drawing insights, recommending refinements to policy and SOP, pre-empting potential implementation problems, analysing issues encountered and following through on actions that need to be taken until issues are resolved

• Personal effectiveness: Able to meet timelines for assigned projects, email replies and preparation of presentations, contribute to high-level discussions on strategies and approaches, build rapport with team members, assign work effectively and ensure timely completion of tasks with quality

• Relationships building and account management: Proficient in initiating contacts, engaging and communicating with different types of organisations, identifying opportunities for new areas of collaborations or new innovations, facilitating partnerships by linking up suitable parties, supporting the team to execute appropriate negotiation strategies to formalise agreements aligned to SWDA’s interests and objectives, and managing the accounts effectively and professionally to consistently achieve a high level of trust and camaraderie while ensuring SWDA discharges its responsibility on prudent governance in the use of public funds by its appointed partners

• Service design and customer management: Proficient in empathising with customer experience, improving service delivery, and supporting the team in managing appeals and feedback from customers with issues

• Resource acquisition and management: Capable of computing/estimating budgets and resources required for each assigned project with appropriate assumptions and basis, prioritising the use of available budgets and resources and making trade-offs when necessary

• Audit management and enforcement: Skilled in identifying risk areas (e.g. fraudulent claims and process lapses), guiding the team to implement effective mechanisms including tweaking business workflows, processes and documentation checks to mitigate risks, taking and following through appropriate enforcement actions, and ensuring closure of audit observations and findings