Scaling AI talent: An AI apprenticeship model that works

AIAP in the beginning: Goals and challenges 

The AIAP started back in 2017 when I was tasked to build a team to do 100 AI projects. To do that, I needed to hire AI engineers. Like any other hiring manager, we started with the traditional route of putting out a job description and trying to recruit. But the applications that came in, while not bad — we had 300 from all over the world — only 10 were from Singapore. As a Singaporean AI R&D outfit, I couldn’t have only 10% of our engineers be Singaporeans and the rest foreigners. I needed the ratio to be the other way around! So, based on a hunch, we created the AI Apprenticeship Programme. The hunch was that there were a lot of Singaporeans out there learning about data science, AI, machine learning and Python on their own. There’s a lot of buzz around it, and these are people who could be quickly brought in and, given the right training and guidance, become real-world AI engineers. 

Very early on, we knew that we wanted to bring in people with the right skills and attitude; academic qualifications or background wasn’t a primary concern. So, AIAP was open to anyone with any background as long as they could pass our technical assessment, which assesses whether they can do the job of a junior AI engineer. That’s the role we expect an incoming apprentice to be able to fill. And why that role? Because a lot of Singaporeans and locals have been learning AI, machine learning, and Python on their own. They know enough to do that, but they don’t get hired by large organizations because they lack real-world experience. With AIAP, coupled with 100E, we solved that problem. It becomes a win-win-win situation: the apprentice gets to work on real-world problems and beef up their resume, I get good enough AI engineers working alongside my more experienced engineers to deliver on the 100E projects, and the company gets an AI model or product developed in seven months. 

The impact of AIAP on individuals, companies and the AI ecosystem in Singapore 

Over the last seven years, we’ve approved nearly 180 projects, of which more than 100 have been completed. We’ve trained more than 400 Singaporeans to become AI engineers, and nearly all of them are today AI engineers, AI consultants, managers, or data scientists. There’s no other program in Singapore, or I guess in the world, that has nearly a 100% placement rate of their students into the role they were trained for! We are thrilled with the outcome and honored by the support of Singaporeans who have given up their jobs to join AIAP, and the companies that took the risk to work with us in the early days when we were new and untested.