The role of educational institutions isn't just to design a curriculum for the students, but to align what the students learn with what industries need. And now that AI is disrupting multiple roles to the point that as much as 60% of a given job may change within a year, keeping up with industry needs has gotten more challenging.
This calls for a shift in the way students are taught and prepared for their entrance into the workforce, says Lucas Tok, the deputy senior director of the Business and Creatives Cluster at Singapore Polytechnic. Speaking on the sidelines at the HR Learning Festival and Symposium 2025 held at the polytechnic's campus in July, he described a growing need for the curriculum to incorporate hands-on, industry-embedded experience before young people actually graduate and enter working life.
"When you look at how generative AI and agentic AI are changing the industry, one of the big calls we have to take today is around the future. As more technological advancements take place, how can our graduates not just get that first job but sustain their career health for a longer period of time?" he said.
It is a multi-pronged effort, he explained: not just from educators, but also from industry partners who need to actively work with institutions to redesign curricula and syllabi in a way that matches current and future needs.
"Fresh" graduates can't be "fresh" any more
Singapore Polytechnic is one of several institutions that are shifting toward increasing embedding of industry experience into the curriculum. A number of the school's faculties have already brought industry partners on board to host year-long internships, including for HR students, and these extended stretches of working time will replace the traditional final-year project.
"We hope that after the year long stint, organisations will be open to taking our students in as full-time employees," Tok said.
Industry involvement isn't just for internships, he added; from year one, getting the students industry exposure is a central feature of their education. In one module, students get a seed fund with which to start their own businesses, and to ensure that what they are working on actually matches up with real-life sector demands and needs, the school this year brought in industry mentors from sectors aligned with the students' business ideas.
In other programmes, such as for the HR students, the curriculum includes learning journeys with industry partners, short-term work attachments, and industry projects. In short, by the time students graduate three years later, they have ideally accumulated almost that length of actual industry-centric working experience as part of their studies - something that can give them a very important leg up when seeking their first full-time job.
The convergence of polytechnic and university learning
Traditionally, polytechnics have focused on practical skills - applied learning, technical execution, intensely industry-specific capabilities - and doubling down on integrating industry experience into the curriculum supports this. But with AI catching up, is that enough?
"Pedagogy has to change," Tok said. "The classroom of the future is not confined within four walls or limited to the current world. For those of our students who are going into white-collar jobs [which are affected by AI] what's important for them is to ensure that they are using the tools available for them today."
As an example, he described the Business Essentials module where students have to start their own businesses: just as in real life, some of these business ideas will fail and the groups will have to be disbanded, and then the students will need to find another group to take them in, most likely in a different capacity from their original group.
"With this module, very early in year one we are telling them to think about redesigning their roles and redesigning their jobs. We're not training them just to be entrepreneurs. We're training them to be intrapreneurs. So when they go into the white-collar jobs of the future, they will be thinking constantly: how am I adding value to the organisation that I'm with?"
It is a mindset that has been heavily emphasised over the last few years as AI tools became more powerful: having the initiative to constantly, actively think about using their existing skill sets in different ways, augment what they know and are doing, and respond to industry shifts.
Employers have to change their thinking too
Just as students - who will later be jobseekers and then employees - need to take on new levels of learning and experience to compete effectively in a disrupted job market, employers have to take a similar view of job roles and skill sets. Large multinationals already work closely with educators to map out the future of different jobs and entire sectors, said Tok, but many SMEs still have some distance to go.
"If SMEs want to scale and grow the organisation for the future, we are ready to help and support them with the steps they need to take," he said. Singapore Polytechnic works closely with trade associations and other ecosystem partners to support initiatives around workforce transformation, and also provides various tools and learning journeys for organisations that are trying to transform.
Importantly, he added, employers must be ready to recognise the value that their workforce brings. There are multiple stories of graduates being able to add value by leveraging unexpected segments of their education to improve parts of their job or even the entire organisation, and the ball is then in the employer's court to take the improvement a step further and also to recognise the person who enabled it.
"That's the future we want to see for our graduates," Tok said. "We want to empower our students to show true value, and then to bring that value to the negotiation table with their future employer, so that ultimately everyone benefits: the organisation takes another step on its scaling journey and the employee is recognised for the contribution."