New Year, New Work

On my first day of work in 2020, I reported to work at my new workplace in Buona Vista. I have taken the next step in my career with a posting in the Ministry of Education Headquarters as a staff officer in the Educational Technology Division. It was definitely a different feel than the first day in school. Settling down at a relatively bigger desk in my division's office on a high floor, I was soon expected at introduction and induction sessions which were basically hints or indications of the meetings that would come throughout the year.

NTU Alumni clubhouse view from near my desk

Star Vista view from near the lift lobby

My work desk

Without revealing too much details, my deployment and jobscope would entail futuristic work relating to the technological aspects of the educational landscape in Singapore. Nonetheless, I must add a disclaimer that my blog would still only include my thoughts, feelings as well as ideas from my experiences or exposures and it does not represent any organisations that I am affliated to.

Our work leans more on the left side of this framework

I am slowly getting used to the systems thinking expected of us and I liked the way we started off the year based on our Division wide breakfast get-together followed by an address by our boss. There were mention of Steve Jobs' legacy, a Welsh concept called the Cynefin framework as well as OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) loops, Andy Grove's inflection point on an S-Curve, Prof Rosabeth Moss Kanter's ideas on culture and also the need to focus on only a few projects at a time. In essence DET wanted us to focus our efforts as a division on SLS/AI, Digital Making, PDLP and SgLDC (considering a formal vs informal and a students vs teachers 2 by 2 matrix).

Afternote: Little did we know that COVID-19 was going to disrupt and accelerate some of these workstreams in different ways.

We were introduced to Steve Jobs' legacy of focusing on a quadrant and we will be doing the same at ETD

I will follow up in a future post with some insights relating to the readings which we are expected to do to be up-to-speed with some of the areas of work in the division. Doing the readings as 'homework' on-the-go and over the weekend reminded me of my university days and it is something that I welcome. Another thing that I hope to write about in the future too is the ETD X-labs which is inspired by Google's or Alphabet's. The ETD Senior Specialists are doing research and development as well as some futures work relating to the division's focus areas. Now, it is time for me to go back to my readings. Till next time!