MOVE TOWARDS PERFORMANCE MERITOCRACY 

A Straits Times Forum Page letter published on 4 September 2014

I BELIEVE Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong's call for a "culture shift" is not a call for perfect parity between graduates and non-graduates in terms of job opportunities, promotion prospects or starting pay ("Culture shift a matter of degrees"; last Saturday). Neither is he saying degrees and paper qualifications have become worthless.

His real message is that one should not go on a paper chase just for the sake of it.

To progress, you need to know what you are good at and interested in, master your skill in it and advance your expertise continually.

If paper qualifications and degrees help in this process, you should pursue them. If not, you can do it through apprenticeship, self-study and work experience.

So, credentials by themselves are not crucial; they are important only insofar as they boost your competence. If your credentials are irrelevant or do not help you to be a better worker, then your degree or qualification would be worthless.

In effect, PM Lee has clarified for us the definition of a new "performance meritocracy", which values people for their qualities, competencies and contributions as workers and leaders in our economy, whatever their fields or credentials. In such a meritocracy, discriminating between graduates and non-graduates becomes irrelevant.

In fact, we should move from our present elitist "credential meritocracy" to a more egalitarian "performance meritocracy" based on competence and expertise.

One practical measure to help foster the new meritocracy is to minimise the income disparity of the top performers in all fields. This would rationalise the system of rewards and inspire Singaporeans to work harder by valuing excellence in all fields, rather than over-rewarding only certain prestigious fields.

Daniel Lee