SINGAPORE - Retrieving her colleagues' payslips upon request used to be a tedious process for Wildlife Reserves Singapore (WRS) senior payroll executive Kelly Lim.

The 35-year-old had to log on to the company's internal system to search for the employee's birth date for file encryption purposes, use an application to encrypt the file, and send the document to the person via e-mail.

But a four-month course she attended last October, under a career conversion programme by Workforce Singapore, helped her learn robotic process automation (RPA) skills to write a code that could automate this process.

"It can streamline our processes and free up time so we can look at how other processes can be improved and automated... RPA is also quite accurate. It will not make mistakes. So it really improved our efficiency," she said.

WRS assistant human resource manager Chiew Bee Lian, 34, who attended the same course, applied the knowledge in the dissemination of birthday e-mail.

Instead of manually personalising and sending such e-mail to employees, she used RPA to automate the work.

Both Ms Chiew and Ms Lim said they had no prior background in coding and were nervous about going for the course.

But with help from the trainer and some use of the Google search engine, it turned out to be relatively easy to pick up these skills, they noted.

During the course, they also learnt to train a chatbot that can answer questions related to staff overtime claims and more. It is set to be launched for WRS use next year.

Said Ms Chiew: "It definitely benefits us... We are desk-bound staff and we have administrative work to do. Some of the work is repetitive and manual, so these automative processing skills will come in handy."