Vision:

Productive employees, Contributing members of society

Mission:

Develop employability skills and values in the service sector

The Elements of Business Skills (EBS) syllabus is designed as an introduction to business concepts by understanding business activities, focusing on basic marketing and customer relations, in Singapore’s context. Students will have opportunities to acquire foundational business knowledge and develop transferable employability skills in the service industry, namely the Travel and Tourism, Hospitality and Retail industries.

The service industry continues to play a significant role in Singapore’s economic growth and offers employment opportunities. With globalisation, changing demographics and technological advancement, businesses are innovating and reinventing themselves to stay ahead of the competition. The study of EBS in the selected industries would provide students with opportunities to learn and develop 21st Century Competencies needed to thrive in an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world.

In the EBS syllabus framework shown below, the concepts of basic marketing and customer relations are at the core of the EBS syllabus. The middle ring represents the outcomes of syllabus, namely foundational business knowledge, decision-making skills and an enterprising mindset. The outer ring defines the scope of the syllabus to be within the three service industries of Travel and Tourism, Hospitality and Retail.

Computer Applications (CPA)

Vision:

Critical thinkers, Technologically adept citizens

Mission:

Develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills to contribute effectively in an increasingly technological driven world

The syllabus emphasises fundamental knowledge and skills, and include the appreciation and use of software application packages for word processing, computer drawing and image editing, multimedia presentations and documents, spreadsheet calculations and charts, game design, programming; as well as, applications on the Internet.

The general aims of the syllabus are to enable students to:

1. acquire skills in using a variety of computer application software and hardware to accomplish tasks and communicate ideas;
2. appreciate the ethical, legal and security issues relating to the use of computers and ICT in society;
3. recognise the impact of ICT on society and people; and
4. develop basic computational thinking and problem-solving skills.

The design of the 2019 CPA syllabus is guided by the Computing Curriculum Framework which was revised in 2017. See Figure 1. It consists of the following:

• Vision statement for computing education
• Dimensions of computing
• Core Concepts of computing
• Components of computational thinking (CT)
• Practices of computing practitioners and professionals