TL;DR – We encourage you to spend money on yourself.
The Great Singapore Sale has just started. There are many wonderful deals coming up. Time to SHOP!!!
Image via YourSingapore.com
Feeling a little lost about what to spend your money on?
We have some fantastic recommendations. These recommendations will give you discounts of up to 95%! You can save up to thousands of dollars! And unlike some of your purchases, we guarantee that you won’t regret spending your money.
Where got such amazing deals?! We are glad you asked.
The greatest investment is investing in yourself.
That’s why we believe that the best way to spend money is to spend money to improve ourselves, learn a new skill, or to deepen our expertise. And if you are a Singapore citizen, you can get great discounts on an entire range of courses. We found two main avenues that you can get extremely substantial discounts on some really interesting and useful courses.
WDA Funding for Individuals
Image via WDA
WDA provides extremely generous funding for Singaporeans above 21 years old to go for continuing education and training (CET). How generous? Up to 95%.
There are courses in diverse fields. If you want to learn about how to write scripts, make films, or pick up any other skills to better work in the media industry, there are courses for you. You have green fingers and want to make Singapore more of a garden city, there are courses for you too! Or if you do business with companies in China and need to improve your business Chinese, there are courses for you too! Want to go into the Food and Beverage industry? Be the next MasterChef? There are courses for you!
Some of those courses are part time courses that span a few weeks to a few months. WDA also provides subsidies for full-time one-year diplomas (e.g. industrial design, animation and visual effects). With the WDA subsidies, you effectively get a 70% discount. That translates to substantial savings. The highest savings we saw was for a one-year diploma. With the discount provided thanks to WDA funding, you save $11,000!!!
Tech Bootcamps at Great Discounts
Tech is the big buzz now. By 2017, Singapore could have a shortage of nearly 30,000 professionals in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. To meet this need, the Infocomm Development Agency (IDA) has launched the Technology Immersion and Placement Programme (TIPP). As IDA explains:
” TIPP programme is an initiative by IDA to convert non-ICT professionals, especially graduates from Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) disciplines into industry ready ICT professionals and placed into tech roles, after undergoing short duration, intensive and immersive training courses delivered by industry practitioners. “
The TIPP provides funding for individuals attending tech bootcamps. These bootcamps are full-time courses lasting seven to twelve weeks in areas such as digital marketing, digital product design, web development, and mobile app development. These bootcamps don’t just equip you with the skills, they also have meet and greet sessions with potential employers. Or if you are looking at founding your own startup, some of these bootcamps also have session for you to network with potential co-founders and investors.
The funding provided by the TIPP translates to discounts of up to 70% for Singaporeans who attend these tech bootcamps. This translates to savings of nearly to $8,000!
What are you waiting for?
It’s really easy to get these subsidies for training. You don’t even have to apply separately to WDA or IDA. Just apply for the course you would like to attend. If the course and course provider are on the approved lists, then you automatically get the subsidies. In other words, you just pay the highly “discounted” fees that would have already taken into account the very generous subsidies.
Want it to be more affordable?
Sure! You can use your SkillsFuture credit to offset whatever balance of the course fees. And if you are an NTUC member, you can also use the Union Training Assistance Programme (UTAP) funding to defray 50% of the unfunded course fees (capped at $250 per year).
Image via skillsupgrade.ntuc.org.sg
With such amazing discounts, it’s really affordable to deepen our expertise, pick up a new skill, or generally to upgrade ourselves. The best part is, these discounts run whole year round! They aren’t just limited to the GSS period. That said, it’s never too early to start planning to upgrade ourselves. And we guarantee that it will be more worth spending time and money on upgrading yourself than spending on shopping for clothes, bags, whatever!