Singapore grads battle low-paid trainee stigma to get hired

As the class of 2026 join the race to find jobs, unemployed college graduates in Singapore are taking a last-ditch shot at getting ahead: temporary government-funded gigs that earn them half the median first paycheck. The government’s Graduate Industry Traineeships, known as GRIT, offer a stopgap for graduates to gain industry-relevant experience with government agencies or private businesses, with an allowance of 1,800 to 2,400 Singapore dollars ($1,400 to $1,850) per month. The lowest end of that range is less than half the median graduate’s starting salary and around two-thirds the wage of a McDonald’s Corp. management trainee, who needs only a pre-university diploma. “When I started the program, I thought: ‘Shucks. I’ve finished four years of school and all I’ve got is a job that pays half of what my friends get’,” said Lee Jia En, a 25-year-old graduate from the Singapore University of Social Sciences. “But I felt it was worth it if it could help me get to my next job. So I said OK, let’s eat humble pie.” Governments around the world have been laboring to prop up a sagging graduate jobs market amid a surge in artificial-intelligence adoption, a post-pandemic slowdown in hiring and lingering economic impacts from the Iran war. Those headwinds run especially strong in trade-dependent, energy-importing Singapore. “Heightened uncertainty” has made businesses in the city-state more cautious about hiring, Manpower Minister Tan See Leng said in May, while Prime Minister Lawrence Wong has warned that some existing jobs “will disappear” because of AI. In the first quarter, retrenchments across the workforce climbed to the highest level in nearly three years. Still, the broader labor market showed resilience with the unemployment rate holding steady at 2%. Phang Jun, a 24-year-old communications major who graduated last year from Singapore Management University, felt her college degree was “useless” after applying for 100 jobs and receiving three low-paid offers outside