UniSIM Joins Hands With Social Enterprise Project Dignity

On 18 November 2015, SIM University (UniSIM) and Project Dignity signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), signalling their intention to work towards giving participants who have gone through Project Dignity's culinary programme the opportunity to read university-level courses at UniSIM.

Since 2012, Project Dignity has been running as a Continuing Education and Training Centre for food and beverage training and offering programmes such as the Certificate in Culinary Arts, as part of the Singapore Workforce Skills Qualifications (WSQ). Conducted in its own functional food court, Dignity Kitchen, Project Dignity's programmes form an important practical component of the hawker trade.

The academic pathway to UniSIM will complement Project Dignity’s WSQ courses and will help participants gain relevant and higher university-level skills, such as financial management, human resource management, customer relationship management, marketing and supply chain management. This academic pathway is targeted at those who wish to venture into the food and beverage industry in areas such as managing a food court, setting up a café or operating a franchise. The participants could be young entrepreneurs as well as PMETs (professionals, managers, executives and technicians) looking for a career shift; essentially people who can professionalise and revive the hawker trade.

This collaboration will provide opportunities for the upskilling of the workforce in the food and beverage sector, which has been identified as a priority sector in the government's SkillsFuture initiative.

_{Signatories of the MOU: (from left) Professor Tsui Kai Chong, Provost of UniSIM; and Mr Koh Seng Choon, Executive Director of Project Dignity.}