Ask a Singapore primary school student what they want to be when they grow up. Listen carefully to the answer and then ask where it came from. While many of them would name a specific career in response, you might also hear “I want to work hard and grow up and get a job so that I can earn a lot of money.”
Doctor. Lawyer. Engineer. Finance. These are not random choices. They are inherited ones. They come packaged with a specific rationale: these jobs pay well, they carry status, and they signal to everyone around you that the effort your family put in was worth it.
This is understandable. Singapore’s economic story is one of the most remarkable in modern history — a nation that went from third world to first in a single generation, built on the belief that education and hard work could lift anyone. The parents and grandparents of today’s students lived through that transformation. Of course they want their children to aim high. Of course money matters. It does.
However, there is a question that rarely gets asked in the rush toward good grades and good jobs: is this the right framework to hand a child?
What the Top Jobs Actually Pay
Let’s start with the data, because the numbers are real and they matter.
In Singapore in 2026, the highest-earning professionals include specialist doctors (median above S$15,000 per month), senior AI and machine learning engineers (above S$12,000), financial traders (S$8,000 to S$20,000 depending on firm and performance), and data scientists (S$10,000 to S$16,700). At the very top of the distribution sit legal partners at major firms, where annual compensation can reach S$800,000 — around S$66,700 a month.
For fresh graduates, the picture is more grounded. The median starting salary across Singapore’s universities in 2025 was S$4,500 per month. Computing and information technology graduates start at around S$5,500; medicine and law graduates at S$5,700 and S$5,500 respectively; engineering at S$4,500; business at S$4,200; arts and social sciences at S$3,800.
These figures explain a lot. If you know that one degree path starts you S$2,000 a month higher than another, and that gap compounds across a career, the pressure to choose the “right” degree makes complete economic sense.
What Singapore Students Are Told to Aim For When They Are Told to ‘Work Hard’
Research on career aspirations among advantaged Singapore students found that the top choices are predictable: doctors at 14.5%, teachers at 6.1%, engineers at 5.9%, business managers at 5.7%, and lawyers at 4.1%. The top five jobs. The approved list. The same list that has been in circulation for decades.
This list isn’t chosen by children. It is transmitted to them — through overheard dinner conversations, through the questions relatives ask at Chinese New Year, through the accumulated signals of a culture that has decided, collectively, which kinds of work carry worth.
Singapore even has a word for the anxiety that drives this: kiasu. Afraid to lose. The fear of falling behind, of choosing wrong, of watching someone else’s child get ahead while yours stagnates. It is not a pathology — it is a rational response to a genuinely competitive environment. It has costs, and the costs tend to fall on the children.
The tuition industry — worth S$1.4 billion — exists largely because of this. Not because Singapore’s children are failing, but because the fear of not optimising is so deeply embedded that opting out feels dangerous.
The Question We’re Not Asking
Here is what gets left out of most conversations about jobs and futures: the evidence on what actually makes people feel that their work is worthwhile.
Researchers who study career fulfilment have identified that the factors most strongly associated with feeling prosperous in your career are not salary alone. They include purpose — believing that your work contributes something beyond a pay cheque; pride in what you do; stability; and what researchers call career-life integration, the sense that your work fits into a life you actually want to live.
This does not mean salary doesn’t matter. It does — especially in a city as expensive as Singapore, where housing, childcare, and the cost of everything are genuine pressures. Financial security is not a luxury. Telling people to follow their passion and the money will follow is advice that works better in some circumstances than others.
However, financial security and fulfilment are not the same thing. The research suggests that chasing one without any thought for the other is a reliable path to a high-earning career that you dread going to every morning.
A 2024 Universum survey of more than 10,000 Singapore university students found that the top career aspiration among female students was work-life balance — not salary. Male students prioritised strong compensation, but work-life balance ranked second. The students themselves are already sensing that something beyond the pay cheque matters. The conversation hasn’t caught up.
The Cost of Telling Kids to Just ‘Work Hard’
When children are handed a career script before they have had the chance to discover what genuinely interests them, several things tend to happen.
They pursue a path that was chosen for them, not by them. They reach the destination — the degree, the job, the salary — and find that the arrival doesn’t feel the way they expected. They are ill-equipped to navigate the inevitable moment when the path doesn’t work out, because they never developed the self-knowledge to pivot toward something else.
Only one in five Singapore youths reported feeling well-prepared for future career and financial demands. That is a striking figure for a country that invests so heavily in education. What it suggests is not a failure of academic preparation — Singapore’s students are academically capable — but a failure of career literacy. Young people who have been told what to aim for, but not how to think about what they actually want, are underprepared for the questions that matter most.
The most dangerous version of this is the student who gets everything right — the grades, the degree, the graduate job — and then, in their late 20s or 30s, realises they have been living someone else’s life.
A Different Conversation
None of this is an argument against ambition, or against choosing a well-paying career. Doctors, lawyers, and engineers do important and meaningful work. Many of them chose those paths because they genuinely wanted to — and their lives are richer for it.
An ex-student of mine said to me the other day that if he had his way, he would pursue music to the ends of the earth. He knows what a dead end it might be in Singapore in terms of career success, and has chosen to pursue a path in engineering. Still, I saw a spark in his eye when he talks about singing, a spark that disappears immediately when he talks about his undergraduate engineering modules at university.
The argument is for honesty. For conversations that acknowledge that success can mean different things, and that the definition worth most is the one a person builds for themselves, not inherits from their environment.
Some questions worth starting with:
What do you notice yourself doing when you lose track of time? What kind of problem do you find yourself wanting to solve, even when no one is asking you to? When you imagine your life at 45, what does a good day look like — not a successful day by someone else’s standard, but a day you’d actually want?
These are not soft questions. They are the hardest questions. Most adults haven’t answered them. Most were never asked.
Singapore’s children deserve the chance to start answering them early. Not instead of working hard and aiming high — alongside it. Because the student who knows why they’re working hard is fundamentally different from the one who is simply following instructions.
One of them will get the job. The other will know what to do with it.
At Curio, we believe in preparing students for life, not just exams. Register at curio.sg
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