New centre to focus on employability of disabled

SINGAPORE — The Government is making a bigger push for the employment of people with disabilities, with a new centre offering career advice, job placements and training for this group.

SG Enable — an agency formed in July to provide support to those with disabilities — will manage the centre when it is ready in 2015, Minister for Social and Family Development Chan Chun Sing announced yesterday.

The facility will be located at Redhill and include an information and referral centre on services and schemes for those with disabilities, a career centre offering vocational assessment, job placement and support services, as well as facilities for courses and on-the-job training.

Mr Chan noted that those with disabilities now have the same lifespan as able-bodied citizens, and that they would like to find employment like anyone else on the open job market and not just at sheltered workshops.

Currently, only one in five people with disabilities are employed in the open market, while the other 80 per cent are in sheltered workshops or under care arrangements. There are about 100,000 people with disabilities in Singapore at present.

“We have to find better ways to take care of them, not just from a financial perspective but also to meet some of their social, emotional needs. And this is why we want to make a big, big push to up (their) employment — provide them with more job opportunities to take care of themselves financially and also allow them to fully integrate into the society that we live in,” Mr Chan said.

SG Enable’s “expanded role” and new site — which will feature relevant stakeholders and partners, including voluntary welfare organisations (VWOs) — will facilitate the increased employment of those with disabilities in the market.

Ms Ku Geok Boon, Chief Executive Officer of SG Enable, explained that job-seekers with disabilities will have their suitability for available employment options reviewed by the agency. The agency will then work with VWOs and partners to either find them employment or put them through the necessary job training.

SG Enable will also be a common touch-point for employers to easily access available schemes, advice on human resources and information on job modification and redesign, which will better equip them to hire people with disabilities.

The agency will “provide a focal point for us to draw together the resources of the employers, the communities and also the various VWOs in order to strengthen employment opportunities for our persons with disabilities”, Mr Chan said.

“Only so will we be able to make a breakthrough of that one-in-five employment target that we’ve so far achieved today.”