The Covid pandemic has in a way created many new jobs and new skills that could still be relevant even after the pandemic is over the hill. Some may need a bit of twitching to become relevant to the job market. At the higher level would be the researchers and scientists that would continue to be employed in similar fields and jobs doing about the same thing, testing and identifying new viruses and developing new vaccines.
In the USA there is a new professional group that have been trained in BSE, blame someone else. Trump is the expert in that and many in the Senate and Congress are equally good.
In our local context, 3 new jobs are very prominent during this pandemic/endemic, the contact tracing expert, the checkers at entry points and the ambassadors. And don't forget the industries that are doing well manufacturing and selling medical safety equipment and accessories and ART kits.
There must now be a small army of contact tracing experts whose job may be looking redundant as more cases would make their job more difficult, tedious and simply impossible to contact. The easier way out is to do less or be selective after all it would become pointless when everyone is infected or vaccinated.
But do not be dismayed. These contact tracing experts can be retrained an upskilled to do contact tracing on the long queues and plane loads of foreigners coming in to steal the lunch of daft Singaporean PMETs. In the last 20 or so years nobody thought it was necessary and a must to do checking on the hundreds of thousands of foreigners flooding the job market. And the industry was not prepared for it and thus it was a free pass into this attractive and rewarding job market. It was a kind of wild wild west, boh cheng hu, and all the cheats and fraudsters and conmen and con women were having a whale of a time making themselves looking very good and attractive and making a lot of money by gold plating themselves. There was almost nobody to check at the gate.
Today we have an army of contact tracing experts available to check on the foreign job hunters. The interviewing techniques honed during Covid19 and their tenacity to trace the links would be very useful to check on the job applicants. The MOM should set up a department to employ these experts to do contact tracing on their qualifications and job experience. MOM cannot say they don't have the resources and skilled people to do the job.
The door checkers can be retrained and upskilled as the new breed of young and healthy and with higher education security specialists. When the endemic is over, this army of door checkers would become redundant and jobless. Retraining and upskilling into security specialists would keep them happily employed and keep the unemployment numbers for Singaporeans low.
As for the ambassadors, this one a bit of a problem. The embassies already have their ambassadors. Maybe outsource them to countries that need cheap and good ambassadors. Maybe they can return to become air stewards and air stewardess.
MOM must start to plan to ensure that these armies of experts in contact tracing and door checkers are gainfully employed and not become jobless or drivers and food deliverers. Put their new skills to good use.