When Geoffrey Hinton — the Nobel laureate often called the "Godfather of AI" — was asked in a podcast this year what young people should do in the face of mass white-collar displacement, his answer was four words long: "Train to be a plumber."
In the United States, 37% of Gen Z bachelor's degree holders in their twenties are now pursuing blue-collar or skilled-trade work, per a Resume Builder survey of 1,400 Gen Zers. A third of them said the trades have better long-term prospects; a quarter said the trades are less likely to be replaced by AI. South Korea is moving in the same direction — 63% of Korean Gen Zers now view blue-collar work favourably, with vocational school applications rising.
A Channel News Asia Big Read this week asked the obvious follow-up: is this happening in Singapore?
The honest answer is: not really. Not yet. And probably not in the same shape, even if it does.
But the more useful question — the one the CNA piece quietly exposes — is what the Singapore version actually looks like for people who do end up in the trades. Because the case studies they profiled share something the headline numbers don't capture.
Why "Just Become a Tradie" Doesn't Map Onto Singapore
The CNA piece pulls together three reasons the US and Korean playbook doesn't transplant cleanly here, and they're worth being honest about:
1. The pay gap is wider. In the US Resume Builder and Zety surveys, a meaningful chunk of Gen Zers believed they could earn similar or higher pay in trades than in white-collar roles. In Singapore, that's mostly not true at the median. MOM's January 2026 Labour Force report shows 80.9% of managers and administrators and 75.2% of professionals moved into higher income bands between 2021 and 2024, versus 41.8% of craftsmen and 40% of plant and machine operators. The mobility curve is steeper at the top of the white-collar stack than the top of the blue-collar one.
2. The labour-market protections aren't there. Walter Theseira, the labour economist at SUSS quoted in the CNA piece, makes a sharp point: in many countries, immigration policy keeps blue-collar wages high by restricting foreign competition for those roles. Singapore does the opposite — "Singapore would never resist automation" to protect blue-collar jobs, he says, because the country needs both automation and a complementary foreign workforce to offset an aging population. So the wage floor for routine manual work is held down, not propped up.
3. The Singapore workforce is already PMET-heavy. 63.7% of residents are professionals, managers, executives, and technicians, against roughly 45% in the US. The denominator is different. The same "white collar to blue collar pivot" narrative produces a much smaller absolute flow here, because there are proportionally more white-collar workers to start with — and the system is built around moving more people into that bucket, not out of it.
So no, "train to be a plumber" is not a tidy answer in Singapore.
The Anxiety Is Showing Up Anyway — Just Differently
The CNA piece is careful to note that the trickle of degree-holders into non-corporate work is happening here — it just isn't being driven by AI fear directly.
FastCo's data: between 2023 and 2024, applications from diploma- and degree-holders for full-time non-executive roles on FastJobs were up 16% year-on-year. Contract roles were up 31%.
But Julian Tan, FastCo's CEO, told CNA the AI angle is "at the margins". The bigger driver is restructuring layoffs nudging PMETs into temporary work. Derrick Teo at Elitez Group says the same: tertiary-educated jobseekers are taking retail and F&B roles because "these roles are relatively easy to enter and exit" — they're a holding pattern, not a destination.
And the Singapore worker's view of AI itself is dramatically less bleak than the American one. Randstad's 2025 Employer Brand Research polled 2,500+ workers here: 50% expected AI to help them in their work; only 6% expected to lose their jobs to it. Compare that to the US discourse around an "AI white-collar bloodbath" and you get a sense of the gap.
So the picture isn't "Singaporeans are fleeing offices for trades." It's closer to: a soft job market is pushing some PMETs into temporary blue-collar or service roles to ride out the cycle, while a small but growing minority are building real businesses out of skilled trades on purpose.
That second group is where it gets interesting.
The Quiet Pattern in the Case Studies
CNA profiled five Singaporeans who built or are building real careers in trades. Worth listing them:
- Zames Chew, 25 — started a handyman business at 16, now runs Repair.sg with 20+ employees. Diploma in international business.
- Amos Chew, 23 — his brother and co-founder. Diploma holder.
- Luqman Abdul Latiff, 36 — graphic design diploma, learned carpentry from YouTube, now runs a 50-person renovation firm where 90%+ of his income comes from the trade he taught himself three years ago.
- Delonix Tan, 27 — business diploma + degree, left a regional sales job to take over his family's fishball stall, opening a yong tau foo restaurant in Serangoon Gardens next month.
- Tsuri Xie, 36 — communication design degree, switched into vinyl wrap installation, has since expanded into paint protection film and laminates.
- Shaik Nifael, 36 — marketing diploma, runs a sanitation and drainage company called Jetters Incz.
Read them in a row and a pattern shows up that the headline of the article doesn't quite name.
None of them are just doing the work. They're all running businesses around the work.
Zames Chew said it explicitly: "For the first seven years of the nine-year journey that I've had, most of my time was spent doing the work of fixing and repairs rather than building a business." He now spends 75% of his time hiring, liaising with clients, and managing his team. Luqman started solo with one Bangladeshi worker and is now at 50 staff. Delonix runs marketing, branding, pre-orders, brand collaborations, and is opening an eatery. Tsuri expanded from one service line into three.
The CNA piece quotes Derrick Teo making the same observation in different words: "In all business organisations, there are always, minimally, two pathways of progress: one is by deepening one's technical skills and becoming a specialist. The other is by developing management and people skills and leading a team." Skilled trades are not exempt from that. They're subject to it.
The Singapore version of "train to be a plumber," if there is one, isn't "swap your laptop for a wrench." It's "learn a real skill, then build something around it that compounds."
That's a much harder pitch. And much harder to do, alone, from scratch, at 16 or 36.
What's Actually Missing
The CNA piece notes — almost in passing — that Delonix Tan started his family business's first website himself. That Luqman built his initial demand from posting DIY videos online. That Zames Chew grew Repair.sg from a one-person handyman job into a 20-person operation by being findable.
The thing that makes the difference between being a tradesperson and building a compounding business in the trades is, basically, distribution. Visibility. A way for the people who need the skill to find the person who has it, without going through an agency that takes a cut and dictates the rate.
That's not a small thing. It's the entire game.
The skilled tradespeople who do well in Singapore — the ones the CNA piece profiles — are the ones who figured out how to be found. They built websites, posted videos, ran their own marketing. The barrier to that has historically been: you have to be the kind of person who also knows how to build a brand, not just the kind of person who can do the work brilliantly.
That's the gap Scout exists to close. A skilled individual in Singapore should be able to list what they do — plumbing, aircon, electrical, carpentry, vinyl, drainage, whatever — and get matched with people who need exactly that, in their area, on their terms. No agency markup. No platform telling you what to charge. No requirement to be your own marketing agency on the side.
If the CNA case studies show one thing, it's that the demand is here. Shaik Nifael says blueprints in Singapore are "hardly updated" — the work needs human judgment that AI can't replicate. Amos Chew calls plumbing and electrical work "essential services that are always a necessity, regardless of economic conditions." Delonix Tan thinks there is "an oversupply of university grads and an undersupply of crafts and tradesmen" in Singapore.
The job isn't to convince anyone that trades matter. The job is to make it easier for the next Zames, the next Luqman, the next Tsuri — someone with a skill and the willingness to build — to actually be found.
The Real Takeaway
"Train to be a plumber" was Hinton's shorthand for "do work that compounds, do work that is hard to automate, do work where physical presence is the product." That advice is right. But in Singapore the framing has to be sharper, because the wage gap, the immigration model, and the labour composition all push the other way.
A more honest version, for Singapore: Pick a skill that has real demand, build a reputation, get found directly, compound.
The first three are on you. The fourth — getting found — is infrastructure. The CNA piece quietly proves the case studies that work are the ones who solved that piece. The ones who didn't are the ones still stuck doing the same number of jobs per week as they did five years ago.
That's the gap worth closing.
Source: Channel News Asia, "AI disruption: As white-collar jobs face threat, are blue-collar jobs the safer bet?" (Big Read, April 2026). Statistics on US/Korea Gen Z behaviour, Singapore workforce composition, and the case studies of Zames Chew, Amos Chew, Luqman Abdul Latiff, Delonix Tan, Tsuri Xie, and Shaik Nifael are drawn from that piece. MOM Labour Force in Singapore report, January 2026; Randstad Employer Brand Research 2025; FastCo / FastJobs application data 2023–2024; Resume Builder and Zety Gen Z surveys 2025.