On 21 January 2026, Singapore Management University launched something unusual for the workforce-training conversation: a dedicated research institute. The Resilient Workforces Institute, or ResWORK, brings together economists, computer scientists and organisational psychologists to study, empirically, what actually helps adults reskill under pressure.
SMU President Professor Lily Kong framed it as research “that shapes public policy, informs organisational practice” — language that signals this isn’t meant to sit in a journal. It’s meant to be used.
A University Institute Built Around a Familiar Problem
SMU has committed S$5 million over five years to anchor the institute, with a goal of securing another S$8 million in external funding within three years. At launch, SMU also signed a two-year MoU with SkillsFuture Singapore to jointly study how AI and generational shifts are changing job tasks and career pathways.
Nine seed-funded projects are already underway across the institute’s three pillars, spanning human-AI collaboration, organisational redesign and labour-market analysis.
The Manager-Belief Study Hiding in Plain Sight
One project stands out for anyone who’s spent time in corporate training rooms. Led by Assistant Professor Nina Sirola, it examines how managers’ beliefs about job-insecure employees shape their own leadership behaviour — and, in turn, whether those employees stay motivated or check out.
It’s not about fixing the anxious employee. It’s about the manager’s mindset first. That’s a meaningful reframe: workforce resilience research is starting to treat the belief systems of the people running teams as the lever, not just the beliefs of the people being trained.
Why Academic Validation Changes the Conversation
The people who run a growth mindset workshop for B2B clients in Singapore have argued for years that reskilling programmes fail when they only teach content and skip the underlying beliefs people hold about their own capacity to change. ResWORK is now testing that claim with actual data, funded in part by a S$450,000 contribution from Equinix for a flagship study on AI exposure across Singapore’s labour market.
For an economy racing to reskill its workforce, that’s a useful check on the enthusiasm. Not every training intervention that sounds right actually moves the needle — and Singapore’s newest research institute now exists specifically to find out which ones do.
