SINGAPORE, June 17 — For the second straight quarter, about two in three retrenched residents picked up a new job in the January-to-March period, bringing this rate to levels last seen in 2018 and 2019, data from the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) showed.

This upbeat finding from MOM’s latest labour market report was just one of several indicators that Singapore’s employment market is on the mend. However, the ministry’s permanent secretary Aubeck Kam noted that Singapore is still not fully back to pre-Covid conditions.

"We expect uncertainties in the economy to continue to weigh on the pace of recovery,” Kam said during a virtual media presentation yesterday on the Labour Market Report for the first quarter of this year.

The report, released to the public this morning, showed that the rate of re-entry of retrenched residents into employment was 66 per cent, or about two in three — up a marginal 1.7 percentage points from the previous quarter.

For comparison, the rate of re-entry previously seen was: