NATIONAL PRODUCTIVITY BOARD TRAINING VOUCHERS

Dr Kanwaljit Soin asked the Minister for Trade and Industry whether any new measures have been taken to increase the uptake of the 20,000 training vouchers issued by the National Productivity Board.

Mr S. Dhanabalan: The objective of the training voucher scheme is to ease the cashflow problem of companies, particularly the smaller ones, when they invest in training. The scheme allows the companies to claim the benefits of SDF subsidies immediately upon registration at pre-qualified courses, without having to go through a refund procedure. However, because this involves an upfront payment from the SDF, the scheme is only applicable to shorter courses.

NPB launched the voucher scheme on a pilot basis in April 1990 with the issue of 20,000 vouchers to SMEs to generate widespread publicity. The vouchers were valid for 182 pre-qualified courses. Since then, based on the experience and feedback from the pilot run, NPB has refined and expanded the scheme. The following improvements were made to the scheme to increase the use of vouchers:

a) opening the scheme to all companies, regardless of size;

b) increasing the number of pre-qualified courses to 300;

c) introducing open-dated vouchers; and

d) distributing vouchers also through the self-help organisations for them to sponsor workers for training.

In addition, NPB has also organised seminars for some 500 small companies to acquaint them with its grant programmes and the voucher scheme for training and upgrading their workers. There will be more of such seminars.

The results have been encouraging. The number of training vouchers used has increased from 808 in FY 1990 to 6,188 in FY 1992, an increase of more than seven and a half times. In the first half of this year, 5,303 vouchers have been used.