EE

After submitting the EE and through discussion with my supervisor, I have a few key learnings from the process. While conducting primary research, I learnt the importance of entering interviews with an open mind. I had to be very careful about asking leading questions and learnt how to evaluate the responses that interviewees gave me in a meaningful manner that could contribute to the overall conclusion of my essay. Furthermore, I understood the importance of not only considering the economic and political, but also cultural and social ramifications in the hiring process from a HR perspective. There is a very fine line between balancing the efficiency targets of the company and sufficing the public’s demands when it comes to hiring. Singapore has been especially interesting to study in this regard because, on one hand they opt for a free market to allow productivity, however everything is under tight speculation to match the needs of the local population.

After submitting my first draft, I was able to understand how economic analysis of a market, in combination with psychology research can help to understand the role of social attitudes in an economic situation, in my case – the labour market. My research was successful in coming to a conclusion, however I found that only part of my hypothesis was true. After unpacking my conclusions and seeing how my findings could be broken up into smaller segments, it really helped me understand the importance of approaching my topic from different disciples as it brings in more factors and variables to come to a more cohesive conclusion. After considering my findings, I view the labour market as a much more complex situation. It is no longer something that can simply be represented by an economics diagram, because people themselves cannot be rationalised and therefore using one subject to unpack my research question is not ideal.

I have completed in-depth research of the implementation of Fair Consideration Framework (FCF) and begun to look at the effects of this, on the labour market in Singapore. I realised that in order to evaluate the impacts of FCF, I must first have comprehensive knowledge on the formation and objectives of it. When conducting initial research, I found it challenging to find statistics that directly linked employment in F&B to FCF. Therefore, I realised I would need to use triangulation to conduct quantitative and quantitative data to reach a thorough conclusion. Also I have noticed some flaws in FCF. It was initiated due to Singaporean PME’s being replaced by expats, however, the framework now exempts any job that earns over $12,000 a month and therefore wouldn’t have the desired effect of protecting employment for local PME’s. I feel like throughout this process it will be very important to questions some of the decisions made in order to properly evaluate FCF.

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/17xl0abYN0EmJbfq7pDNrPSfVJYhMmIj03SjRd4u9-Vo/edit