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?

MOM’s Report on Wages in Singapore, 2005

MOM's Report on Wages in Singapore 2005

The above link is broken.......use this one instead...

This is an extremely interesting report from the MOM. If you're interested in how much the grad from NUS EEE earns on average or how much a bellboy earns or what is the average differential in earnings between males and females for the same position, this report will shed some light.

I have yet to study the report in detail (not sure if I want to), but here are some observations from the report.

Diploma holders who graduate and then go on to serve NS earn more

They earn more than than their counterparts who do not have NS liability or served their NS before going on to study. I would have thought those who enter the workforce immediately after graduating would have earned more. They still earn less than degree holders though, by what I think is not a small margin.

Income bracket grouping for CPF contributors

All earnings refer to monthly wage.
About 14.2% of them earn $5000 and above.
About 29.2% of them earn $1499 and below.
The largest group (for intervals of $1000 in monthly wage) stands at about 22.8% for those earning $2000-$2999.

Wage differentials between the sexes

I gave it a quick look and found that most of the time, men do earn more than women.

For managers, the guy gets about $1000 more each month for basic and gross compared to the gal.
For professionals, the guy gets about $400 more each each month for basic and gross compared to the gal.

Information technology positions were among the lowest earning group among professionals.
Quoting the report "Highlights on Occupational Wages, 2005":

Occupying the lower five positions were mainly information technology related occupations, namely systems designers & analysts ($2,200); software engineers ($1,711) and applications programmers ($1,700). This reflects the strong competition of programmers from low-cost countries.

Not very surprising huh? From what I know, degree holders still have a better cut of the deal, as in most of them will still earn above $2.2K. Asking around, diploma holders are a lot worse off, I have heard of them being paid from $1.4K to $1.6K. This also ties in with my observation that there are many PRCs, Indian nationals, Indonesians and Vietnamese working in IT locally because the barriers to entry for the IT profession in Singapore is much lower than say, medicine, law, engineering or teaching, and the strong Singapore dollar.

The situation is more complex than that since wages are rising in India and PRC, in addition to other costs brought about by the high turnover rate. Moreover, mutual recogntion agreements that accompany FTAs will lower the barrier to entry to various professions including doctors and accountants. What we may see could be stronger competition in professions other than IT in a few years time.

Other interesting information

The report is really full of interesting tidbits, like what is the average commencing salary of fresh grads from each course in the local universities. One of the more interesting tables is the one titled "Median Monthly Basic and Gross Wages of Selected Occupations by Age in All Industries". If you believe in benchmarking yourself against others from the same job and age group, this one could give you a sense of bearings.

If you are interested in salary guides, here's another one from Kelly Services, but I don't think it'll be as accurate as MOM's but it's a guide.