Forum: Analyse job postings to get insight on AI impact
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During the Budget debate on artificial intelligence and its impact on jobs, several MPs said that Singapore should accelerate AI adoption while ensuring that it leads to better jobs and wages ( Budget debate: MPs urge clear targets to measure impact of S’pore’s AI push
Both aims make sense. But the challenge lies in measurement.
AI rarely eliminates jobs overnight. More often, it quietly automates specific tasks within a job, such as report preparation, data cleaning or document summarisation. Job titles may remain unchanged even as the structure of work shifts.
Traditional labour indicators such as employment levels and wages therefore tend to detect disruption only after it has already occurred.
One way to gain insight earlier is to analyse job postings. Using AI tools, researchers could extract and track the tasks described in thousands of job advertisements, which would reveal how work evolves across industries.
Singapore already has a valuable source of such job postings data on the MyCareersFuture portal. Making anonymised datasets available for research could enable universities and spin-off student projects to study how tasks and skill demands are changing because of AI.
This would deepen policy insight while training Singaporeans in AI-enabled labour analysis.
Understanding how work changes may be just as important as counting how many jobs there are.
Chong Ryh Huei
