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Engineering Grads, SMRT is Looking To Hire You & Is Willing To Give Near $4K Starting Pay

2018-02-27 , 11:14 am

Raise in starting salaries

SMRT has announced plans to add 2,500 more employees to its 11,000-strong workforce over the next three to five years. Of the 2,500, 200 will be newly-recruited engineers for its current MRT lines and the Thomson-East Coast Line, which will open in phases next year.

Starting from next month, the beginning pay of its graduate engineers will be increased by $350 to $3800 a month, for “good honours degrees”.

Polytechnic graduates will be paid $2,400 a month, up by $200, while those with Higher National Institute of Technical Education Certificates will get a basic monthly salary of $1,900, a jump of $225.

Attractive re-employment contracts

SMRT isn’t content with bringing in fresh faces to the workforce either. The public transport operator has come out with five-year re-employment contracts for deserving employees.

At the age of 62, workers in its train divisions who have performed well and are healthy will be entitled to a five-year re-employment contract, If they choose to take it, they will be rehired on yearly contracts, up till the age of 67.

Incentives

That’s not all either. SMRT will also push out incentives to encourage rail maintenance and operations teams to work together in ensuring rail reliability.

For one, teams which manage to meet pre-set targets will be awarded up to $250 for each employee per quarter.

Engineering expertise

The moves, say experts, will help increase reliability and help SMRT maintain and develop engineering expertise, an aspect that has been exposed on more than one occasion in the past.

Just last year, in 2017, SMRT took disciplinary action against a total of 11 staff members (eight of which were fired) following a flooding incident that shut down a large part of the North-South line for 14 and a half hours. In the process, a whopping 231,000 commuters were estimated to have been affected.

One month later, in November, two trains collided at Joo Koon MRT station, injuring 38 passengers. The cause was discovered to be incompatibility between a new and old signalling system.

Incidentally, the boosts were produced as a result of the SMRT-NTWU (National Transport Workers’ Union) talk last week.

About time

Even before the flooding and collision incidents, SMRT has been under fire, no thanks to multiple train breakdowns and unexplained train delays.

While this latest development no doubt bodes well for the local train system, one can’t help but wonder:

Why did it take this long to happen?