Sustainable Business / SATS Academy Enabling Workforce Transformation

SATS Academy Enabling Workforce Transformation

As Asia’s leading food solutions and gateway services provider, SATS has a vital role to play in encouraging the adoption of more sustainable practices across the industry and supply chain.

As the training arm of SATS, SATS Academy is deeply committed to driving growth across the aviation industry by harnessing our culinary and technical expertise to spearhead training and development opportunities and help individuals stay relevant and future ready.

Since its launch in 2018, SATS Academy has evolved to become more than just a training provider, driven by our ambition to make a lasting and positive difference across the aviation community.

It is our aim to touch the lives of many more people as we continue to invest in efforts to share our expertise, empowering our communities with the opportunities and platforms to develop skills for the future.

This year, SATS Academy has been appointed by SSG1 to deliver the Pilot Enhanced Training Support Package, which caters for employees in the aviation community who have been affected by the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. As part of this initiative, which was announced on 2 March 2020, SATS Academy offers 115 training programmes covering topics such as ground handling support technical skills, culinary skills, and critical core skills. These programmes have been extended to participants from approximately 20 key players and partners in the air transport sector.

  • The SATS Academy offers

    115

    training programmes.

Over the past year, SATS Academy has offered more than 55,000 training seats and provided valuable training and development to more than 11,000 individuals from various sectors in the aviation industry. These efforts reflect our longstanding mission to facilitate lifelong learning through skills upgrading, reskilling, and developing personal effectiveness and emotional resilience in our people, providing them with the knowledge they need to succeed and thrive.

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In FY2021-22, SATS Academy has offered more than 55,000 training seats and provided valuable training and development to more than 11,000 individuals from various sectors in the aviation industry.

Leveraging the ETSP2, we continue to encourage and enable SATS employees to branch out and explore their interests and, in the process, acquire new skills that extend beyond their current roles. For example, individuals who are aspiring chefs can participate in culinary classes offered by SATS Academy and develop the relevant skills required. Participation in cross-functional courses also allows employees to develop a more holistic perspective of SATS and the different aspects of our business. For instance, a dishing staff who works in our production kitchens or a corporate employee who would typically not be exposed to customer-facing roles, can now enrol in courses on topics related to passenger service, such as ‘Serving Passengers with Reduced Mobility and Disability’. This can help them broaden their knowledge and appreciation of other fields of work, better understand various operational challenges, and further strengthen our collective sense of purpose.

At the same time, SATS Academy also plays an active role in helping to enhance the quality of services across the air transport sector. Drawing on our service experience and expertise, we invest heavily in creating programmes aimed at helping the community to acquire domain expertise and critical soft skills so as to better serve travellers in a post-COVID world. Participants in our programmes include employees from leading industry players like SIA, Japan Airlines, JetQuay and SmartCarte.

Recognising that different organisations have different training needs, we also develop customised training programmes that cater to the unique requirements of our participants. For example, we have tailored several training programmes for SIA cabin crew, including disruption handling, addressing services lapses, communicating and relating effectively, flying with wellness, managing conflict, and serving passengers with reduced mobility & disability (PRMDS) & passengers with special needs. Conducted by highly experienced SATS Operations Trainers, some of these courses provide flight crew participants with extensive knowledge and valuable insights into the complex and crucial decision-making process on the ground, which ensures a smooth passenger experience from check-in to the actual flight. In doing so, this also helps to foster a deeper understanding between SATS ground handling teams and SIA cabin crew, laying the groundwork for more seamless cooperation and joint management of real-time disruptions and delays.

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Participation in cross-functional courses also allows employees to develop a more holistic perspective of SATS and the different aspects of our business.

In addition, SATS Academy also conducted culinary courses for SIA cabin crew. These include cheese appreciation and wine pairing, culinary enhancement training courses, and a culinary workshop on the basics of making sauces. These courses help to increase the culinary knowledge of cabin crew to enable a delightful travel experience.

As part of this initiative, SATS Academy developed on-the-job training blueprints for employees who may be redeployed to new roles and responsibilities, ensuring that our people, whose roles may have been affected by the pandemic, remain gainfully employed. For example, customer service agents who have been redeployed to support our cargo or eCommerce operations would take guidance from the training blueprints to acquire the competencies and process understanding of their new role, in order to fulfil their duties well. This experience helps these individuals to develop the confidence, resilience and agility to take on new challenges as the industry continues to evolve.

On a nationwide level, SATS Academy has partnered WSG3 to reskill, upskill or multiskill approximately 4,000 employees whose jobs have been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Over the past year, in response to the global pandemic, we pivoted swiftly and converted many existing in-person programmes to virtual sessions, which have proven to be equally effective and highly advantageous. Virtual training is unaffected by COVID-19 restrictions and multiple sessions can be conducted simultaneously, allowing us to continue offering a wide range of training and development courses to the aviation community throughout the pandemic. In addition, going virtual allowed us to roll out training programmes to different geographies more easily, reaching a wider audience beyond Singapore.

  • 1SkillsFuture Singapore (SSG) is a national movement to provide Singaporeans with the opportunities and resources to learn new skills as part of individual and professional development.

  • 2The Enhanced Training Support Package (ETSP) was introduced by the Singapore government to provide support to sectors that were directly and severely impacted by COVID-19. The ETSP includes funding and course fee subsidies for eligible courses within the stipulated period.

  • 3Workforce Singapore (WSG) is a statutory board that oversees the transformation of the local workforce and industry to meet ongoing economic challenges