This paper concerns the changing nature of employability skills, moving from the original life skills or basic skills concepts to the increasingly work-oriented interpretation. The early concept of employability skills linked employability skills to job readiness and holding down employment. However, the work-oriented focus is increasingly linking the impact of employability skills to organizational (or performance) outcomes, which in turn are linked to workers' career mobility and wage gains. This paper makes use of recent skills utilization data in Singapore to map out the relationship between employability skills and mobility. It shows that employability skills in Singapore are increasingly job context related, going beyond just holding down a job. As such, mobility is likely to be influenced by the extent to which employability skills are shared between industries. Recognition of the context-related nature of employability skills has led to the modification of workforce development training in Singapore in order to meet the needs for greater employability skills effectiveness through 'contextualized' training provision.

Many people go for training to upgrade their skills which is hoped to pave the way for better pay. But what are the kinds of skills that really affect wages? Employers have emphasized the value of generic skills such as interpersonal and communication skills, teamwork and problem solving. Does possession of these skills translate to at least the same or better wages as compared with having broad skills represented by educational qualifications and job-related training? This paper, arising from the research project on the Skills Utilisation in Singapore, aims to answer which skills can have more influence on wages and which job-related training in terms of training duration can have more impact on wages. Using ordinal logistic regression, our findings show that educational qualification and initial training time can influence wages as well as utilization of leadership, planning and problem-solving skills.