Singapore Mum Got Her Degree at 36 While Raising Two Kids — But Five Months Later, the Job She Expected Still Hasn’t Come

SINGAPORE — For years, the formula sounded simple: Work hard, earn a university degree and improve your chances of landing a better job.

For Singapore working mother Jillian Lim, completing that missing qualification became an 18-month test of endurance involving night classes, full-time work, two young children, sleepless nights and growing strain at home.

She made it through.

At 36, she graduated with second-upper honours in business marketing.

But five months after graduation, the outcome she had hoped the qualification would deliver had yet to arrive: She was still looking for a job.

And her experience arrives at an uncomfortable moment for Singapore's long-standing faith in academic credentials.

A university degree remains valuable. But mounting evidence suggests that in a labour market being reshaped by artificial intelligence, restructuring and rapidly changing skill requirements, the piece of paper may no longer be the automatic career insurance policy many workers once assumed it was.

SHE HAD ALREADY SPENT 16 YEARS WORKING

Lim's story did not begin with someone trying to enter the workforce for the first time.

According to her account published by CNA Women on September 9, she started working at 19 while still studying at polytechnic, hosting a weekday morning radio programme on the former Hot FM91.3.

After receiving her diploma, she postponed university.

At the time, the decision did not appear particularly reckless. She already had professional experience, was earning a good salary and had secured the kind of broadcasting job many graduates would have wanted.

The degree could wait.

It eventually waited about 14 years.

What changed was the growing possibility of retrenchment.

Lim recalled how her father, who had himself experienced retrenchment without having a degree, warned her that his lack of a university qualification had made his own job search significantly harder.

Facing uncertainty at her former company, Lim finally enrolled in a bachelor's programme in business marketing, hoping the qualification would complement her years of broadcasting experience and strengthen her employment prospects.

FOUR TO FIVE NIGHTS OF CLASS — EVERY WEEK

Instead of spreading her studies over several years, Lim compressed the programme into roughly 18 months, attending classes four to five nights a week.

She was not simply a student.

Her youngest daughter was about a year old. Her older daughter was four. She was dealing with interrupted sleep, childcare responsibilities and, later, a new full-time job that kept her at work until around 6.30pm.

By her third academic term, the strain was showing.

Lim wrote that she experienced hair loss, became increasingly irritable with her children and found herself resenting the time her husband was spending training for a marathon.

School also became a way of postponing disagreements at home. Instead of resolving conflicts, she sometimes retreated to assignments and lectures.

By the final term, she described herself as exhausted and frequently arguing with her husband.

Yet she finished.

And she finished well.

THEN CAME THE QUESTION: WAS IT WORTH IT?

The qualification gave Lim something tangible to add to the education section of her resume.

What it did not immediately provide was a job.

Five months after graduation, she said she was still searching.

Even more unexpectedly, Lim found that the combination of substantial work experience and a newly obtained degree did not always fit neatly into employers' hiring categories.

She said the new qualification sometimes resulted in her being regarded as a fresh graduate despite her years in the workforce — leaving her in what she described as a professional “no man's land”.

That does not prove her degree hurt her employment prospects, and there is no public information showing how many jobs she applied for, the positions involved or why individual employers rejected her.

But the difficulty she describes fits into a broader change now confronting both young graduates and experienced professionals in Singapore.

SINGAPORE'S GRADUATE JOB MARKET HAS BECOME TOUGHER

The latest university employment figures underline that pressure.

Among Singapore's 2025 autonomous university graduates, 88.9 per cent had secured employment within six months, down from 91.2 per cent in 2024. The proportion actually working within six months among graduates who sought jobs was 83.4 per cent, compared with 87.1 per cent the previous year.

Median gross monthly salary for those in full-time permanent employment held at S$4,500.

Speaking on September 7, Coordinating Minister for Social Policies Ong Ye Kung also acknowledged that graduates are entering a tighter market. The share securing employment within six months has declined from 92.9 per cent in 2023 to 88.9 per cent in 2025.

His broader message, however, was not that degrees had become worthless. Singapore, he said, remains an economy that is growing and attracting investment — but employers have more graduates to choose from and increasingly use internships, experience and other indicators to differentiate candidates.

Those figures concern fresh graduates, so they cannot be directly applied to Lim's mid-career situation.

But another labour-market trend is particularly relevant to experienced degree holders.

DEGREE HOLDERS ARE NOT IMMUNE FROM RETRENCHMENT

Singapore's first-quarter 2026 labour data showed degree holders recording the highest retrenchment incidence among educational qualification groups, at 3.1 retrenchments for every 1,000 resident employees, up from 2.6 in the previous quarter.

The Ministry of Manpower said the shift reflected restructuring concentrated in professional and knowledge-intensive industries.

The Business Times similarly reported that higher-educated workers were among those affected as companies reorganised in sectors including manufacturing, financial services and professional services.

The situation intensified in the following quarter.

Preliminary MOM figures showed 4,500 retrenchments in the second quarter of 2026, up from 3,830 in the first quarter. That was the highest quarterly number since late 2020, although MOM stressed that retrenchment remained well below levels typically associated with economic downturns.

There is therefore an important distinction.

Singapore does not appear to be experiencing a broad employment collapse.

Total employment increased by 10,700 in the second quarter, extending employment growth to a 19th consecutive quarter, while the overall unemployment rate remained around 2 per cent.

Instead, the pressure appears more complicated: jobs continue to be created even as companies restructure other roles.

THE DEGREE STILL MATTERS — JUST DIFFERENTLY

Declaring the university degree dead would therefore go far beyond what the evidence shows.

Degree holders continue to enjoy important advantages in Singapore's labour market, and higher qualifications remain relevant for many professional careers.

But employers are increasingly looking beyond qualifications alone.

The Business Times reported in February that nearly 80 per cent of Singapore job postings in 2024 did not formally require a degree, although degree holders still secured many of those positions. The growing emphasis is on combinations of technical capability, real-world experience, adaptability and problem-solving ability.

That distinction may become even more important as AI changes the tasks employees are expected to perform.

Ong Ye Kung said this week that AI is currently replacing certain tasks rather than entire jobs in most cases, but acknowledged that its impact on work will become increasingly profound.

The emerging career equation may therefore be less:

Degree = job security

and increasingly:

Degree + relevant skills + experience + adaptability = stronger employability.

WORKING MOTHERS FACE ANOTHER LAYER OF THE EQUATION

For Lim, the issue was never merely academic.

There was also the cost paid at home.

Her account describes the guilt of spending evenings studying instead of being with her daughters and the tension created as her husband assumed more parenting responsibilities.

That reflects a broader challenge facing Singapore caregivers who attempt to remain in — or return to — the labour market.

MOM said in March that the female labour-force participation rate among residents aged 25 to 64 increased from 76.1 per cent in 2019 to 80.5 per cent in 2025.

Over the same period, the proportion of caregivers aged 25 to 64 who were neither working nor looking for work fell from 28.2 per cent to 17.2 per cent.

About seven in 10 firms now offer some form of flexible work arrangement, according to the ministry.

Those numbers show progress.

They do not eliminate the trade-offs experienced inside individual households.

SO WAS HER DEGREE WORTH IT?

Lim herself does not yet have a financial answer.

The degree has not magically produced a new job, she wrote, and months of rejection emails have inevitably raised questions about its return on investment.

But the experience delivered something that cannot easily be measured on a salary spreadsheet.

She returned to formal education after 14 years away from the classroom, continued working, raised two children and completed the programme with strong honours.

Most importantly, her daughters watched her attempt something difficult and finish it.

That may ultimately be the most revealing part of the story.

The Singaporean “paper dream” has not disappeared.

A university degree can still open doors, raise earning potential and remain indispensable for certain careers.

But in 2026, it increasingly looks less like a guaranteed ticket and more like one component of a much larger employability package.

For Lim, the biggest question is therefore still unresolved.

The degree is finally hanging on the wall.

Now she has to find out whether the door she spent 18 exhausting months preparing to open will eventually move.

WWC ONE MEDIA M.J.E