A Conversation with Foo Kuo Yang, Senior Human Resources Director at STMicroelectronics Singapore
SSIA: How does receiving this award reflect your company’s commitment to workforce transformation within the semiconductor industry, particularly in the Singaporean context?
Kuo Yang: We’re not just preparing for a future-ready workforce—we’re creating a holistic and immersive approach for the development of the future workforce. Additionally, we have an emphasis to provide viable opportunities for those preferring an applied learning approach and the “road less travelled”.
This award is really the result of the collective contribution of our team in STMicroelectronics. It demonstrates the value of STMicroelectronics’ belief and commitment to future-proofing our workforce in Singapore. The differentiated approach STMicroelectronics has taken in transforming our current and future workforce can be a “proof-of-concept” reference for the rest of the semiconductor industry. It is crucial that our workforce transformation is addressed holistically as an industry.
SSIA: Which specific initiatives or strategies have been particularly impactful in the semiconductor sector and contributed to receiving this award?
Kuo Yang: STMicroelectronics strongly subscribes to the pedagogy of applied learning and embedding real-world work into the development of our workforce. Through such integration, we can equip our future workforce with first-hand work experience, technical know-how, and necessary soft skills in the workplace, such as critical thinking, communication, and collaboration skills. We are very glad that our integrated learning environment and strong partnerships with SIT, SgIS and ITE have helped our interns/trainees develop themselves during their stint to become a ready workforce for our company and the industry. In return, our interns have injected a sort of “reverse mentoring” by sharing the latest (and future) trends and knowledge in areas such as AI, as well as innovative prototype solutions with our existing workforce. These complement our transformation efforts and foster an environment of cross-learning and appreciation for a diversity of experience and skills.
In addition, we have implemented several initiatives to upskill our operator and technician workforce, creating skills development opportunities and organic career growth for them. We have now created internal competency pathways to upskill operators to technicians, technicians to assistant engineers i.e. through the Work-Study Diploma program, and assistant engineers to engineers via a competency stackable micro-credentials program with SIT.
STMicroelectronics recently deployed robots on the manufacturing floor for manual handling tasks, and more than 100 employees benefitted from learning new skills of handling, working with, and maintaining the robots.
STMicroelectronics is now embarking on the Job Role Redesign (JRR) with SSIA, WSG and McKinsey that will potentially benefit more than 100 employees with digital and AI skills to future proof our workforce.
SSIA: How has your company adapted its workforce development strategies to align with both local and global trends in the semiconductor sector?
Kuo Yang: STMicroelectronics strongly believes in the applied learning and “reverse mentoring” approach. Through this approach, we foster an environment where our interns bring their unique expertise to the table, such as AI-empowered solutions, cross-learning and discussion sessions with our existing employees. Through these interactions, many innovative and relevant solutions were developed to serve our business needs.
Reverse mentoring need not always happen in a formal setting, as much knowledge can be gained informally through daily engagements. This is “ST teaches ST”, where the learning never stops.
SSIA: Can you provide examples of how your workforce initiatives have made your organization more agile and future-ready, especially in Singapore’s competitive landscape?
Our work-study programs have been a key pillar of our workforce initiative. The key to the success with the programs is that ST onboards the interns and trainees as if they are actual employees and equips them with essential technical and soft skills through the experience of working alongside real-world employees. The work-study interns and trainees are put through the same training as our employees and are involved in real daily jobs to gain hands-on experience. Through this integration between our employees and our interns/trainees, our company developed the learning agility for both our employees and our interns/trainees, where our employees benefit from the new knowledge and creativity that our interns/trainees bring, and our interns/trainees apply their knowledge and creativity in real-world applications with the guidance of our employees. This mutual “collaboration” creates the future-ready workforce for our company and our industry.
SSIA: How do you view SSIA’s role in driving unity and transformation within the semiconductor sector as we approach 2025 and beyond?
Kuo Yang: SSIA is central to our semiconductor industry. With the strong and sustainable partnerships built across the ecosystem, SSIA is well-positioned to connect the dots between agencies, learning institutions and companies to recommend and/or drive industry level initiatives.
A few key successes are the Electronics Industry Day which has evolved tremendously over the last couple of years to become a trademark event for our semiconductor industry, Semiconductor Awareness Day, SAY Ambassadors and IC Design Camp which continue to bring the awareness and appreciation of our industry to the doorsteps of our future generations, Semiconductor Women’s Forum to showcase the diversity and inclusion of our industry and progressively demolish the gender bias in our industry.
There is a big opportunity for us to grow our industry in the mentoring space and SSIA has formalized the semiconductor industry committee (which I am proud to be a member of) to explore and roll out initiatives for mentoring.
Moving forward, the target is to have more companies within our ecosystem proactively take up mentoring initiatives to strengthen our value proposition as an industry.
SSIA: What do you see as the most critical areas for workforce development in the semiconductor sector to ensure we remain competitive and relevant?
Kuo Yang: There is a need to accelerate the adoption of assistive technologies like robotization and AI to complement our engineering workforce in this competitive talent landscape. This will allow us, as an industry, to redesign our work and position our engineering workforce higher up the value chain to attract more talent into our industry.
What message would you like to share with other industry professionals regarding the importance of workforce transformation in the semiconductor sector?
For our industry to remain competitive for the future, workforce transformation has to be a continuous journey. I truly urge more companies in our ecosystem to come together to explore and commit to forward-looking workforce initiatives to grow our industry as a whole. It is in unity that we find strength; and in collaboration, we discover endless possibilities.
