Yes, but is for their Local graduates.

For foreigners, you need to compete with talent from other countries such as India, China, Myanmar, Philippines, and of course Malaysian.
They will use very expected salary to apply/spam to the job (everyone are desperate to come SG), so if you put higher expected salary than them, you must be unique and have the skills that others dont have.

FYI SG have very high competitive environment, but the good is there are a lot of opportunities.

Tips: Apply SME jobs and it will be less competitors.

Job Title : Business Analyst (within company)
Job Desciption : Client Facing (requirement gathering, change request, UAT, project planning, system deployment, incident investigation...etc), internal (SIT, regression testing, defect tracking, report defects to developer..etc )
Age : 28
Years spent in company : 7 months
Company : SME (Business Intelligence product and also IT projects related to BI)
Industry : Computer software
Tenure : Perm
Experience before joining (years) : 3 years as part time project engineer in vendor (bank projects), 3 years 9 months as QA in ship owner company (In-house system, need to travel frequently)
Highest paper qualification/ education background : B. Degree (IT)
Location : Singapore
Average Working Hours Per Week (incl lunch hours): 40 +-

Monetary Payout
Basic Salary + Fixed Allowance : SGD 4500 +
Contractual Bonus (months): 0
Performance, Variable Bonus & Commissions (months) : Performance Bonus (1-2), Annual Supplement Wage (1), Project Completion (1 month (pro-rated) split into 3 phases)

Benefits (where relevant) :
Health Benefits : Medical Insurance
Transport Benefits : NA
Flexi Working Hours : Yes, not necessary follow 9-6, sometimes can be 10-6, 10-7...etc

Goal is to climb for project lead/manager role and of course more money as SG is high cost country, current salary is definitely not enough if wish to build family and own flat in here.

** Updated bonuses **

This post has been edited by Frank3: Jul 19 2018, 03:09 PM

Yes, 13th month and performance bonus.

FYI the project completion bonus is very subjective (only for high contributor/performer for the project that i currently involve), and not for every project. However this is the first project that i am involving in this company.

Even Miri can achieve that amount. My previous colleague work as Technical Superintendent (manage vessels/ships) already get 9-10k per month. The head of region can earn 20k ++.

You can look for other jobs which required travel, with more pay. Anyway is up to you if you are happy with the pay, if you are single or have another income source..

I agreed, especially the employer is desperate, they don't care how much you jump or ask for reason for leaving.

May i know what you work as your first job? Software engineer?
Mind to tell us your company size? Big MNC or SME?

Both of your first and second job salary increment are very good, most of the employee will not increase their employee's salary proactively with such high incremental unless the counter offer.

Glad to know your bosses and management appreciated your hard work. Sometimes we work hard, take initiative to learn and solve the problem but management won't appreciate it, especially you are not money making department. For example, IT department in company which never earn their money by technology (indirectly IT did help them in operation but management blindly see this as COST).

I agreed with you that EQ is VERY IMPORTANT especially in MNC. An organization or company is all about people. The more people in a company, the more difficult to control, hence emotional intelligence play a big big part here.

Yes, work for experience, take initiative to learn, don't stay in comfort routine job, and also know your value (90% of management/bosses are reactive, we need to ask for promotion/increment proactively.)

Need to have strong statistical/math background if im not wrong. If technical wise will be data engineer side.

Singtel sub-company = NCS (https://www.ncs.com.sg/)


Full stack developer with 3 years + exp can get 4-6k SGD. It will be even better if you know DevOps tools like Jenkins, Dockers...etc
Now most of the IT companies in SG are transforming into automation CI/CD, including government agencies.

I believe it is possible to get 4.3k because the job nature is quite dangerous as he need to fixed the equipment, maybe on offshore RIG. I also believe his job is contract job, hence the basic is high. But 22 years old is really young and he can save a lots of money to build/invest his future if he intend to switch career or settle down.

Accepted a job offer recently. Looking to switch my career to more technical instead of functional, i found that if you work in IT field, you need to have strong technical background as well.

Job Title : Test Analyst
Job Desciption : Develop test automation framework (functional test) & performance test.
Age : 29
Years spent in company : 0 (haven't join)
Company : A famous company (owned casino)
Industry : Leisure, travel & tourism
Tenure : Contract (2-year contract with possibility of permanent conversion)
Experience before joining (years) : 8 yrs
Highest paper qualification/ education background : B. Degree (IT)
Location : Singapore
Average Working Hours Per Week (incl lunch hours): 45 +-

Monetary Payout
Basic Salary + Fixed Allowance : SGD 5300
Contractual Bonus (months): 0
Performance, Variable Bonus & Commissions (months) : NA

Benefits (where relevant) :
Health Benefits : Medical Insurance
Transport Benefits : NA
Flexi Working Hours : Yes.

This post has been edited by Frank3: Mar 8 2019, 05:10 PM

I just want to gain the experience & exposure in test automation. I should know how bad/good situation over there once i joined them.

Please note that the contract doesn't mean bond -> you cannot resign until contract end.

I still can resign with 1 month notice within the 2 years contract. IMO, 2 years is good enough even though they don't want to renew the contract (provided my performance is bad), otherwise they will renew the contract or offer the permanent conversion because the project there working on is really huge which required more than 2years to complete.

I strongly agree your point of view here, some ppl doing the same routine job for 10 years doesn't mean he/she deserve higher salary, provided he/she never upgrade and learn new skills.

IT professional cannot survive if he/she is type 2..

Those MNC/SME should change the hiring mindset if they want to hire talent..

"I'd rather work with a professional and motivated "beginner" than a lazy "expert" who is unwilling to learn or listen to new perspectives."

"20 years of experience does not mean much if you have no understanding. I have known people with many years of experience who could only do something from memory. If a new issue showed up they were lost."

I saw a CEO wrote this in LinkedIn

"Experience is good but should not always be the criteria.

I worked with a fresh graduate with no vast experience in the labour market.

I'd have written him off but thank God I never did.

I chose to work with him because he was hungry and had an eagle eye.

He was also an avid reader and a fast learner.

It took him just six months to solve a major technical problem in our company.

I was blown away.

The problem had cost us a lot of money.

We were already thinking of replacing the machine.

He came on board and showed it's not the number of years every time but how much you are willing to learn.

He changed my mindset to see beyond years and experience.

I felt guilty I had written him off but at the same time, I was happy I gave him a chance.

Give people a chance because we all started with no experience.

Someone saw and believed in us.

Why not do the same."

For managerial role scenario especially project manager/director...etc, i agreed with you, experience and exposure speaks loudest!
I also found that, if a manger is younger than the subordinates, the subordinates will not happy and try to create problems & politics issues.

Hi Candy, what kind of QA are you doing, there are many kind of test, such as: Manual, Webapp Automation (Selenium), API (SoapUi), Peformance (Loadrunner, JMeter)
Speaking about salary, yes developer literally is higher salary than manual sofware tester, but but but..software automation engineer salary can potentially higher than developer, of course it depend how good you are. (I know a China AI company automation QA can earn 9k SGD per month)
If your current job offering you manual tester job, then please switch to developer or you may look for automation engineer role (but it is very rare for fresh graduate)
PS: I am working in Singapore currently and i found that there is not much automation QA specialist in this market (meaning if you have the right skill sets, you will be hunted by many companies), 95% of them are indian, another 4% is PRC and Filipino...Malaysian and Singaporean is super rare. (correct if i am wrong)

I fully agree with you James, if will be even better if the person know how to integrate DevOps and build up the entire test automation architecture.

It depend on what kind of testing are you trying to automate, yes one of the best test to automate is regression testing. The goal of automation test is to automate repetitive test.
The effort wise, it depend on what kind of test framework are you building. Some test framework can easily build in one day (i am talking about test framework, not test scripts/case).
Manual testing is still mandatory for usability testing, ad hoc testing, exploratory testing, and functional testing (new function that haven't automated)

To be honest i found that business analyst is everywhere and it is very competitive (in Singapore), unless you focus on a single/niche industry & business, such as finance, military, casino and etc..