Grade fixation creates workforce maturity gap

More graduates question whether top grades truly translate into job readiness.

Singapore’s long-standing emphasis on academic achievement is facing renewed scrutiny as employers report growing gaps between technical proficiency and workplace readiness. According to Chen Bao, Managing Director of EHL Campus Singapore, the system’s strength in academic rigour is no longer sufficient to meet the complexity of modern work.

“I don't believe in one-size-fits-all solutions,” Chen said. “I really appreciate academic rigour. That is the strength of the Singaporean system.” However, he added that “the current fixation on grades actually creates a maturity gap.”

This gap, he explained, stems from students spending their formative years in tuition centres rather than gaining part-time work experience or social exposure. Unlike their counterparts in Europe, who often work from age 16, Singaporean students miss opportunities to learn workplace realities that classrooms cannot replicate. Real-world environments, he said, give young people the chance to “navigate workforce hierarchies, manage time and interact with diverse democracies.”

“They excel at the theory, but many struggle with the messiness of human interactions,” he said, citing challenges such as maintaining eye contact, active listening, and resolving disagreements without “a textbook solution.”

When asked what skills are most lacking today, Chen was direct: “The most critical gap is not intellectual capacity. It is the emotional intelligence, the soft skills, the ability to do uncertainties.” Many graduates, he noted, struggle to bridge the divide between academic and professional environments, particularly in reading social cues and building “genuine non-transactional trust,” which he said “you cannot learn purely from the classroom.”

To prepare students for unpredictable job markets, Chen outlined three priorities. First, “education must move beyond the classroom” by embedding real-world, customer-facing experiences and crisis handling into learning environments. Second, selection criteria must evolve. “If we want to change the output, we must change the input,” he said, urging institutions to value empathy and other soft skills at admission. Third, curricula must incorporate AI fluency. “AI will change jobs, but it does not necessarily replace them,” he said, stressing the need to teach students how to manage technology so they can focus on “what machines cannot do, such as human interactions.”