MOM Just Named 29 Jobs Singapore Can’t Fill Fast Enough. Here’s the Full List, by Industry.
Twenty-nine job titles. Seven industries. That’s the actual shape of MOM’s 2026 Shortage Occupation List, published in the ministry’s employer guidebook on 13 November 2025 — and if you’re an SME owner trying to work out where the real hiring pressure sits in Singapore right now, this list is a more useful starting point than any generic “top jobs” ranking, because it isn’t a popularity contest. It’s the government naming, specifically, where local supply can’t keep up with demand.
Infocomm technology tops the list by sheer count: ten named roles, spanning AI scientist/researcher/engineer, cybersecurity architect, cloud architect, data scientist, digital forensics specialist, penetration testing specialist, and several programming and development titles. Healthcare follows close behind at seven named roles, including registered nurse, physiotherapist, occupational therapist, diagnostic radiographer, clinical psychologist, podiatrist, and medical social worker. Between them, tech and healthcare account for seventeen of the twenty-nine names on the entire list.
The full list, by industry
| Industry | Roles named | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Infocomm Technology | 10 | AI scientist/engineer, cybersecurity architect, cloud architect, data scientist |
| Healthcare | 7 | Registered nurse, physiotherapist, occupational therapist, clinical psychologist |
| Green Economy | 4 | Carbon project manager, carbon trader, carbon verification specialist |
| Semiconductor | 3 | Semiconductor engineer, instrumentation & control engineer, process engineer |
| Maritime | 2 | Marine superintendent, marine technical superintendent |
| Agritech | 2 | Alternative protein food application scientist, novel food biotechnologist |
| Financial Services | 1 | Financial/investment advisor (ultra-high/high net worth, family office) |
Source: Vulcan Post, reporting on MOM’s 2026 employer guidebook, published 13 Nov 2025.
Look past the headline count and the pattern gets more specific. The green economy’s four named roles are all carbon-specific — project management, standards analysis, trading, and verification/audit — which tells you the shortage isn’t “sustainability jobs” as a vague category, it’s the actual mechanics of carbon accounting and markets that Singapore can’t staff fast enough. Same with semiconductor: three roles, all technical (engineering, instrumentation, process), no generalist “manufacturing” title in sight. When a shortage list gets this specific, it’s worth reading the specificity as the actual signal, not the total count.
What this list actually does for an employer
Worth being precise here, because it’s easy to confuse with a different MOM mechanism this site has already covered: the Non-Traditional Source (NTS) Occupation List, which widens the pool of source countries employers can hire Work Permit holders from for a given role. The Shortage Occupation List is a different lever — it’s tied to which roles get easier access to certain foreign-hiring channels because the government has assessed local supply as insufficient to meet demand. If your business runs one of these 29 roles, the practical upshot is a shortage acknowledged at the policy level, which typically translates into more flexibility (and more competition for the same scarce local talent) rather than a straightforward wage or hiring rule you can look up as a single number.
Why this list matters beyond hiring — it feeds directly into COMPASS
There’s a concrete, mechanical reason this list matters even if you don’t touch a single one of the 29 named roles yourself: it’s one of the direct inputs into the COMPASS framework governing Employment Pass applications. COMPASS’s C5 Skills Bonus component specifically rewards candidates for roles on the Shortage Occupation List, provided they’re qualified to perform that occupation’s actual duties. That’s not a vague policy alignment — it’s a scored bonus in the same point system that determines whether an Employment Pass application clears the bar.
Practically, that means if you’re hiring a foreign candidate into one of these 29 roles, their COMPASS score gets a genuine, sourced advantage that a candidate for a non-listed role doesn’t get, all else equal. If you’re an SME owner weighing two similarly-qualified EP candidates and one happens to sit in a shortage occupation, that’s a real, structural point in favour of the application clearing more easily — worth knowing before you assume COMPASS treats every role identically.
The skills side: what SkillsFuture says actually transfers across roles
The Shortage Occupation List tells you which specific jobs are hard to fill. It doesn’t tell you what to look for in a candidate who doesn’t have the exact title yet. For that, SkillsFuture Singapore’s Skills Demand for the Future Economy Report — its latest confirmed edition published 24 January 2025 — is the more useful lens, because it tracks skills that cut across roles rather than job titles themselves.
Five skills top that report’s in-demand ranking: generative AI technology and prompt engineering; sustainability-focused skills, including carbon footprint management; market trend analysis; cyber and data breach incident management; and effective client communication. Notice that only two of the five are purely technical — the other three are analytical and interpersonal capabilities that show up across almost any role, not just the specialist ones on MOM’s list.
If you are a candidate aiming at one of these roles rather than hiring for it, Get That Job (a sister site) publishes industry resume samples.
The report’s sector-level figures are worth sitting with too. Of the skills SkillsFuture tracked in the green economy, 26% were classified as in-demand over a three-year window — the highest proportion of the three priority sectors it studied. Digital economy skills came in at 16% (40 of 244 tracked), and the care economy at 18% (19 of 107). That doesn’t mean the green economy has more jobs; it means a larger share of the specific skills that sector needs are currently scarce relative to demand — a genuinely different measurement from job-count, and one that’s easy to conflate if you’re skimming headlines rather than reading the actual figures.
One more figure worth flagging for any SME owner who assumes “creative” skills are a niche concern: the same report states that seven in ten non-creative job roles now require some creative capability, in a sector the report estimates employs around 150,000 professionals in Singapore. If you’re hiring for an operations or analyst role and treating “creative thinking” as irrelevant to the job description, that figure suggests you’re increasingly the exception, not the norm.
One honest caveat before you plan a hiring or training budget around this
The SkillsFuture figures above are dated January 2025 — real, first-party, and still the latest edition this research could confirm, but worth naming plainly rather than passing off as fresh 2026 data. SkillsFuture Singapore has published this report annually in past years, so a newer edition may well exist by the time you’re reading this. If precision matters for a training budget decision, it’s worth checking the Jobs-Skills Portal directly for whichever edition is current at the time.
What I’d actually do with this if I were hiring right now
If you’re an SME owner reading MOM’s shortage list and thinking “none of these are my roles, so this doesn’t apply to me” — that’s the wrong read. The list tells you where the competition for talent is fiercest, which matters even if you’re not hiring a carbon trader, because those seventeen tech and healthcare roles are pulling salary expectations upward across adjacent, less-specialised positions too. A nurse shortage doesn’t just make nurses harder to hire — it puts upward pressure on every healthcare-adjacent role your business might touch, from clinic administrators to allied support staff, because the whole sector is short-staffed and reallocating internally.
The skills data is more directly actionable, in my experience with SME clients trying to write better job descriptions. Most job ads I review still lead with years-of-experience and a laundry list of software tools, and bury the actual transferable capability — communication, analysis, adaptability to a new domain — somewhere in a bullet point nobody reads carefully. The SkillsFuture data says that’s backwards: prompt engineering and generative AI fluency are now genuinely differentiating, but so is plain client communication, which every SME already claims to want and almost never actually screens for in an interview.
If your recruitment budget is fixed and you have to choose between chasing candidates for a named shortage role or investing in upskilling your current team toward the five in-demand skills above, the honest answer depends on your timeline. Shortage-list roles are shortage roles because the talent genuinely doesn’t exist in sufficient supply locally — you’re not going to train your way into a semiconductor process engineer in six months. But if the gap is in AI fluency, sustainability literacy, or client communication, upskilling an existing employee who already knows your business is very often faster and cheaper than an external hire competing against seventeen other companies for the same scarce specialist.
There’s also a sequencing question most SME owners skip entirely. If you’re hiring a foreign candidate for a shortage-list role and you know the COMPASS C5 bonus applies, that’s worth factoring into your offer timeline — a stronger COMPASS score generally means a smoother, faster approval, which matters if you’re trying to fill a role against a hard deadline rather than treating the pass application as a formality that happens after you’ve already made a verbal offer. I’ve seen SME owners make an offer, celebrate internally, and only then start asking whether the pass will actually clear — that’s backwards. Check the COMPASS math before the offer goes out, not after.
None of this replaces judgment with a checklist, and that’s worth saying directly: MOM’s list and SkillsFuture’s report both describe the market as it stood on their respective publication dates, not as it will stand when you actually post the job. A shortage list is inherently backward-looking — by the time enough employers respond to a named gap, market conditions shift again. Treat both datasets as a starting hypothesis to test against what you’re actually seeing in your own applicant pool, not a fixed answer that overrides what your own hiring funnel is telling you.
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