MOM’s Report on Wages in Singapore, 2006

The annual report on wages in Singapore has been released recently by Ministry of Manpower. If you're wondering whether your recent pay increment makes your salary comparable to others in your industry, this is the best place to start. Take a look at the the reports here. There's a lot of data in the reports, and it can be used to find certain trends and info.

Top 100 jobs in Singapore

Salary.sg has put up a ranked list (two lists, in fact) of the top 100 jobs in Singapore in terms of pay. While I believe that pay should not be the sole criteria for evaluating a job, it remains a very important one. We do need to put bread on the dining table after all, and pay decides whether that piece of bread is slice of plain Gardenia or loaf from Delifrance.

As for the actual jobs in the list, I've taken a quick look and there's no surprises there. What is disappoint for me is that it appears that the pay for those in the public sector are not factored in, eg teachers, policemen and firemen. I can't find them in the list. It's worse considering that my job should be out of the top 100 if they had been included...lol

Wage differentials between the sexes

There's no doubt that men do earn more than women, something which we all recognize. What is interesting is that the difference is that the gender wage difference
ranged from 5.7% for professionals to 46% for plant & machine operators for those aged 35 – 39. Quoting the full report,

The differential mainly stems from the tendency for females to disrupt their workforce participation for family reasons which reduces the years of service and experience of working women. Other possible factors include differences in skills, qualifications, job nature/level and working experience as well as possibly higher incidence of males working overtime than females.

If this is the case, I see the huge gap as an indication of how some jobs can utilise IT to minimise the impact when women are at the workplace. I believe it's quite common for companies to have flexible arrangements to allow women to work from home.

Little difference between NUS Bachelor of Computing for honours and non-honours

This is somewhat surprising to me. From table 11, the mean monthly gross starting pay for a graduate with Bachelor of Computing is $2,544 while it is $2,600 for someone with honours. In terms of pay alone, the difference is not significant enough to me. The opportunity cost is one year of expenditure, lost income and experience. Perhaps there are other factors like the research experience gained during the extra year and that students with honours are more employable (87.4% vs 79.5% were employed). As a side-note, SMU students from the Information System Management had a mean monthly gross starting pay of $2,975. That's a pretty big difference considering Information Systems students probably learn the same topics in NUS.

Doing National Service increases your pay

It's true, from table 12, people who have served National Service have a higher mean monthly gross starting salary. But why? Does it imply that employers see that National Service makes a person better to handle work?