Work Is Changing. You Do Not Have to Face It Alone.
In February 2026, Benjamin was let go. Eighteen years at the same firm, performance reviews had always been positive, but one meeting changed it all. The company he worked at was not unionised. At first, they were unwilling to change their position on compensation. This is what made a difference for him. Two years earlier, Benjamin had joined NTUC as a general branch member on a whim. He never thought that he would need it for workplace protection. When it did, NTUC stepped in to mediate, and he walked away with a $47,600 settlement, six months of ex-gratia pay, and an extra month's bonus, which is an outcome he feels that he would not have reached on his own.
In the first quarter of 2026, Singapore's retrenchment numbers ticked up. According to MOM's latest Labour Market Report, 3,830 people were let go, and increase from the previous quarter. Among those retrenched, degree holders took the hardest hit.Professionals, managers, executives and technicians (the PME crowd) continue to be shown the door faster than anyone else.
NTUC's own casework backs this up, reporting over 3,900 retrenchment and termination cases involving PMEs in 2025 alone, a five percent rise on the year before, with infocomm and tech named specifically as sectors feeling the pressure from generative AI.
TL;DR
Retrenchments among PMEs are rising in Singapore, and infocomm and tech are named as exposed sectors.
AI is not the only driver as a recent MOM survey found most companies actually have not adopted AI for work purposes at all. Instead, offshoring and restructuring are leading factors.
You are not meant to navigate this alone. Tripartite protections, a new Tripartite Jobs Council, Company Training Committees, and union support (even without a unionised employer) already exist to help.
Tech moves from code execution to systems ownership, media moves from asset production to creative direction and client relationships.
The convenient villain
It is tempting to blame job loss on AI. In fact, news headlines mostly do. NTUC Assistant Secretary-General Patrick Tay has been pushing back on that. Certain positions, he noted, are being shifted abroad "even when local PMEs are experienced and capable."
If you're sharpening your AI fluency while the actual threat is that the work is simply moving to a cheaper office elsewhere, you may be trying to solve the wrong problem.
But swinging the other way is not right either. A Q1 2026 survey done by the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) found that seven in ten companies were yet to adopt AI for work purposes at all. Of the minority that had, most were redesigning roles and creating new ones. Only a small number had cut their headcount outright. We see that reality is often more complex.
Where you can get support
Singapore already has a Tripartite Advisory that requires employers to treat retrenchment as a last resort (after exhausting redeployment, retraining, and adjusted work arrangements first) and to notify MOM within five working days once five or more employees are let go. NTUC has been pushing, in this year's Budget debate, for that notice to come earlier with mandatory advance notification and stronger penalties for employers who do not comply.
In April 2026, NTUC joined MOM and the Singapore National Employers Federation to form a new Tripartite Jobs Council specifically to coordinate workforce transformation and transition support as AI adoption accelerates.
Closer to the ground, we see Company Training Committees (CTCs) being set up. CTCs allow unions to get a seat at the table when a workplace redesigns roles around new tech, instead of that redesign happening behind closed doors. If your company is non-unionised, that does not mean that you are on your own either. When Shopee's Singapore team went through layoffs earlier this year, the Creative Media and Publishing Union (CMPU) received advance word and representatives were deployed on-site to support affected staff.
Benjamin's story lives here too. For what it is worth, he did not wait for a crisis to join.
From syntax to architecture
In the tech sector, the shift already underway is from writing code to owning the judgment calls around it. AI tools now handle a growing share of boilerplate code, junior coding tasks, and routine debugging, which means a role defined purely by typing lines of code is becoming less relevant.
What's proving hard to automate is contextual judgment. Knowing how a given piece of code fits safely into an existing system, or how a proposed system change plays out across a whole organisation rather than a single service becomes invaluable.
This shift means pushing for systems integration, cloud infrastructure, and technical scoping work rather than staying heads-down in repetitive implementation. As companies adopt AI-driven systems faster than they can properly vet them, compliance errors and cybersecurity gaps are opening up, and the people who can close those gaps become invaluable.
The same is true of the translation layer between technical teams and the business. Engineers who can explain trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders are consistently the ones who have an edge over those who are unable to.
On the AI side, roles like AI Product Manager, MLOps Engineer, AI Governance or Compliance Lead, and Cloud AI Solutions Architect barely existed three years ago. Yet, they are becoming sought-after positions in the tech industry.
On the offshoring side, the same pressure is leading to different roles becoming more sought-after. These include Technical Program Managers and Platform Architect roles built around holding institutional and architectural knowledge. Such roles are often harder to be shifted overseas since they have been based locally and employees are highly familar with the role.
From production to creative direction
In media, the shift is from asset production to creative direction and client psychology. Generative platforms have lowered the barrier to entry for commercial content production, which means the market value of baseline, transactional asset design and creation is dropping fast. What these models are unable to do is form a genuine understanding of the Singaporean audience, understand deep local cultural nuance, or take calculated creative risks.
This reflects the need to shift from execution to editorial judgement. Position yourself as the person who knows why a concept works for a specific audience, not just how to render it.
This also means developing rigorous rights-cleared frameworks. Commercial brands are increasingly wary of copyright exposure from unverified AI-generated material, and media professionals who can navigate ethical content workflows and IP compliance are becoming genuinely critical to the agencies and in-house teams they work with.
The third skill is deepening client management. A client can type a prompt into a generator, but a generator cannot navigate stakeholder alignment, balance competing brand sensitivities, or hold a long-term narrative strategy across a campaign. That relationship is also what protects you as production work moves to cheaper markets overseas.
New roles are opening specifically because of this shift. On the AI side, Creative Director and Brand Strategist titles are absorbing more AI oversight work, and a newer role worth watching is the GEO or AEO Specialist (Generative Engine Optimisation or Answer Engine Optimisation), someone who shapes content to get surfaced by tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews rather than optimising purely for traditional search.
On the client side, the same shift is strengthening senior Client Partner and Account Director roles, positions built entirely around the trust that production work moving offshore cannot replicate. Agencies are also hiring for dedicated rights and licensing compliance roles as AI content production scales.
You do not have to navigate the transition alone
If restructuring affects you or your role gets quietly redesigned, do not panic, but do not stay quiet either. Ask questions about the changes to your role. Check whether your service, benefits, and terms stay intact if you are being asked to move into something new.
And if you are reading this before any of that happens, that is even better. This is the best time to have this conversation. NTUC ICM is the best place to start. Reach out to us via our email address if you have any questions. We are here for you.
