A significant milestone of the year was the decision to restructure UniSIM into an Autonomous University (AU). This is a great honour and testament to our stewardship of the university. We are proud to be given this opportunity to contribute to the national higher education sector. The setting up of Singapore’s third Law School at UniSIM with the offering of the Bachelor of Laws (LLB) and Juris Doctor programmes that will be part of the new AU progressed well. Our inaugural intake was more than six times oversubscribed.

Last year, our application and intake numbers remained healthy despite an increasingly competitive market. Our total student enrolment stood at 13,900 with the full-time programmes doubling to 890. Our new full-time programmes in Supply Chain Management and Social Work have generated great interest.

Supporting the Skills Future movement, we increased the number of courses we offer under our Centre for Continuing and Professional Education. These courses focus on skills acquisition and applied lifelong learning. In addition, they help dislocated PME’s get re-employed. The increased number of organisations seeking to partner us on this initiative is an encouraging sign that employers support lifelong learning for continued relevance and competitiveness.

There has been a disaggregation of the higher education value chain due to the heightened competition from online learning opportunities from all over the world. We, too, stepped up our online learning implementation. We have improved our iStudyGuides and migrated to a new learning management system, Canvas, to provide students with a more engaging and immersive learning experience.

Our key focus in 2017 will be the smooth transitioning of UniSIM into an AU. This will involve reorganisation of resources to take on this new role effectively. We will also invest in strengthening our new brand as an AU.

We will ramp up manpower capability through new hires and development of existing staff, as well as review our systems and processes. Institutional research and data analytics will be tapped to enhance both our operations and teaching outcomes.

Learners who have to travel can expect new pathways to learning and better overseas access to programmes. Tapping on our expertise, we will also be able to support SMEs and companies with overseas operations in their training needs.

As we define our new role for the future, we remain committed to our society and social development. We will develop programmes that support this and strengthen industry and social engagement while at the same time delivering our promise to help every learner reach his full potential.

The education industry continued to feel the pressure of increased competition and decreasing cohort sizes. Despite that, we are pleased to report that SIM Global Education performed better than we expected and that our applications and enrolments remained steady. We maintained our leading position as the top private education provider.

Our good performance was due in no small part to the strong programmes of our partner universities and our shared goal of ensuring the best outcome for our students. It was also a result of our focus on student development, investment in our academic and non-academic staff, and our agility in proactively responding to market changes with new and relevant programmes.

These efforts have borne out well: our students continued to perform well inside and outside the classroom. The number of our University of London (UOL) students – 191 of them - who were awarded first class honours remained as the highest in the world for UOL International Programmes. In our latest graduate employment survey, our graduates enjoyed good employment opportunities with an overall employment rate of 86%, significantly above the private education average.

In the coming year, we will continue to invest in these areas to further enhance our graduates’ work-readiness and employability, not just in Singapore but in the global arena.

In expanding our footprint beyond the small Singapore market, we have started to offer more education pathways for foreign students, both to bring them in for study in Singapore as well as in their home countries. To achieve this, we’ve assembled a strong team of educators to develop high school programmes focusing on foreign students locally and internationally.

We established the SIM International Academy, which will offer the IGCSE education with an Asian focus here in Singapore. Our value proposition leverages the strong Singapore and SIM brands of education and offers a pathway for secondary students to articulate seamlessly into higher education at SIM. The high school will accept its first cohort of students in September 2017.

We will also tap the growing demand for quality education from the emerging economies of our region through the setting up of overseas operations in countries of great potential. The first venture will be an international school catering to students from kindergarten to year 12 in Cambodia, again providing a high quality, seamless educational pathway. Plans are underway and will pick up momentum in the new year.

Leveraging the experience and the expertise of our partners, we will develop a range of executive continuing education programmes with a strong focus on practical competencies and applications to the workplace. These programmes are aimed at upgrading learners’ job-relevant skills and employability, and helping organisations achieve productivity and competitive transformation.

Our signature programmes, the Singapore Management Festival (SMF) and the Job of the Chief Executive (JOCE), continued to be important platforms for business and management leaders to share insights with companies and executives. The SMF, in its second year, gained traction with strong support from both participants and event sponsors. The JOCE was supported by IE Singapore under SkillsFuture, an added impetus to encourage even chief executives to give priority to lifelong learning.

With an uncertain and sluggish economy, demand for short, public executive programmes was soft. Businesses, particularly SMEs, tended to de-emphasise learning and development as they instead focused on immediate business and operational priorities to ride through the market slowdown.

As a result, Professional Development’s performance trended slightly below target. On the other hand, we were able to secure new corporate accounts for in-company training, and the request for customised in-company learning solutions kept pace with the previous years.

Despite the softening demand in public programmes, we continued to consolidate, enhance and align our offerings as total learning solutions that deliver holistic learning and greater impact on personal and organisational performance.

Our Membership unit remained focused on deepening relationships with existing corporate members who continued to be our biggest supporters of executive training. Standalone training activities and learning platforms were curated and packaged with value-added services such as digital resources to help companies keep pace with emerging trends and fast changing business needs.

With a growing need for skills in the social services sector, our entry into this sector has shown potential for growth in scope and scale. Efforts to help SMEs leverage the Productivity and Innovation Credit scheme and alternative funding such as IE Singapore Study Awards were continued.

The economic outlook for 2017 will continue to be challenging. SMEs in particular, will remain cautious with investment in training. There is also a greater emphasis on skills and performance-based training. We will continue to calibrate and fine-tune our offerings, build in-house capability to better curate and offer holistic learning solutions and ensure speed to market with new offerings.

Internally, tighter coordination and more collaborative work processes across operating units will also bring about more synergy, better resource mobilisation and efficiency. We will continue to leverage business intelligence and analytics for better market analyses that inform development of offerings with greater value.

The future demands new and better ways to deliver our value proposition. We remain focused on being a strategic partner to the development of individuals and organisations, and stand ready to meet this challenge with purpose and vigour.