Singapore Fintech Festival 2025: The FinTech Talent Blueprint: Navigating the New Era of FinTech Workforce Transformation,

Greetings from day two of Singapore Fintech Festival 2025. I have managed to navigate my way to Hall 3 (each is the size of a football field) at the right time (my calendar is on Sydney time). I am here to look at skills gaps, so this session on "FinTech Talent Blueprint: Navigating the New Era of FinTech Workforce Transformation" looks relevant. However, no one on the panel seems to be from training, education or human resources. The panel did not start with comments like "anything you learned in school is out of date ... Cutting edges work only happens in industry"m one comment I did agree with was the value of long internships, although the suggested year seems a bit long to me. 

Another panelist said they were willing to pay for top talent and train them. They also said every manager also has to be hands on with a project. That doesn't make sense to me: do senior people really have to be working at a technical level? At the Australian Defence Force HQ I worked for a senior air force officer. They were still qualified to fly a F-18, but would it make sense to sack them when they coul no longer fly (or now drones are making pilots obsolete). As I tell my students, the languages I trained on went out of use before they were born, but human nature doesn't change that fast, so project management is much the same l. As it happens, another panelist is speaking in the value of soft skills, including empathy. 

Overall, the panel was not very informative. Also, there was no time for questions, which is my favourite bit of any panel. Perhaps there is something good in the mentioned "Singapore FinTech Talent Report 2025".