People’s Association in Singapore improves upskilling experiences for communities

People around the world rely on continuing education and upskilling courses to build on their existing knowledge and learn new, industry-specific skills sets. In Singapore, Community Centres (CCs) and Resident Committees (RCs) offer a variety of upskilling courses for residents. CCs and RCs are part of the network of the People’s Association (PA), a Singaporean statutory board with a mission to build and bridge communities.

To improve CCs’ and RCs’ time-intensive, manual process of course administration, PA and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), launched a cloud-based web portal in November 2019.

Saving time: From Excel sheets and email tracking to a cloud-based web portal

PA’s initiative, the Project We Care ENRICH Lab allows numerous corporations to provide expertise-sharing workshops or courses that allow vulnerable residents to gain useful skillsets, stay mentally active, and build confidence. With the global pandemic bringing disruptions to physical classes, PA also adapted to a hybrid-ENRICH Lab where courses can be conducted physically, virtually, or both.

PA handles the administrative work of registering class participants, coordinating class schedules and programmes, and capturing back-end information. Course delivery and scheduling involves multiple parties and heavy-coordination between PA and corporations. Prior to the web portal’s launch, teams relied on manual voice calls, emails, and offline spreadsheets to track and handle coordination. The process was time consuming and disparate—tools were not connected to one another, which led to an increased chance of misaligned information and requests.

PA wanted to find a way to streamline the process and reduce administrative burden, while also improving the stakeholders’ experience. To achieve this goal, they worked with TCS to build a new web portal that would connect all back-end systems, which improved the users’ experience and enhanced the efficiency and accuracy of the bookings.

Today, with the TCS-built portal hosted on AWS and built using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and AWS Elastic Beanstalk, PA staff can access the database virtually and remotely. The portal facilitates and streamlines the course matching process. Prior to each class session, the portal enables the RC staff to track their course bookings and set reminders for follow-ups—all in one centralized site. After the course concludes, past activity is available via the dashboard for reporting purposes.

Enhancing social wellbeing and quality of life

Through the portal, PA staff’s work efficiency improved as a result of smoother and more effective coordination, delivery, and reporting. This portal saves an estimated 850 hour of work per ENRICH phase. With the shift of the programme to virtual modes moving forward, PA will work with TCS to further refine the ENRICH portal to increase the usability for users.

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