Why Facilities Management's greatest strength has become its deepest problem

When I was an undergraduate, I did what most students do before committing to a profession. I looked it up. Salary benchmarks, career trajectories and where Facilities Management (FM) sat in Singapore's economy. Naturally, I went to browse through occupational wage surveys. Oil traders were there. Nurses. Film directors. All 570 professions, 9 categories. Facilities management was not among them.

I assumed it would change. However, fifteen years later, it hasn't.

FM doesn't appear as a named category in our national wage data. The profession gets dissolved into broader buckets: technicians here, managers there, cleaners somewhere else. 

What I found quietly absurd as a student - and still do today - is that the people who compiled that survey worked in offices. Offices with functioning air-conditioning, clean toilets, lifts that work. None of that happened by accident. FM professionals made it happen. They just weren't counted for it.

This is not a complaint about data classification. It is a symptom of something deeper.

FM is built on a principle that sounds like professionalism. If people notice you, something has gone wrong. A well-run building feels effortless. The air is cool, the lights respond, the systems hum. Nobody stops to think about why.

For decades, the sector embraced this invisibility as the mark of excellence. We internalised it. Passed it on. Measured success by how little attention we received. But there is a cost to invisibility that the sector has been slow to name.

When nothing visibly breaks, there is no pressure to invest. Maintenance budgets get trimmed in stable years because nothing has broken. Workforce development gets deferred because the pipelines look adequate. Until they don't. Technology adoption waits for the next cycle. And then the next. Each deferral makes sense on its own. Together, they quietly hollow out the capability base over years, until something fails and FM is suddenly visible again, but only as a problem.

The workforce numbers tell part of the story. Singapore's FM sector faces an ageing technician base, persistent recruitment difficulties, and a talent pipeline that has been thinning for years. But the harder question is why young professionals keep looking elsewhere, even as the work has grown more complex and more consequential.

Integrating building management systems across government estates and industrial portfolios, balancing GreenGov.SG sustainability targets, navigating the Progressive Wage Model. This is demanding, sophisticated work. But from the outside, none of it registers. A fresh graduate scanning career options sees no wage benchmark, no visible professional identity to aspire toward. There is no signal. So, the pipeline stays thin, not because the work is unattractive, but because the profession made itself illegible to anyone who hasn't already found their way inside.

The harder question, the one I think about fifteen years on, is whether FM simply absorbed this invisibility from outside or helped build it from within. Every time we measured our success by how unnoticed we were, we reinforced the very culture that makes the sector easy to underfund and hard to recruit into. We built a profession that excels at disappearing. Then we wondered why nobody could find us.

None of this changes through tribute alone. Recognition without structural change is noise. What FM needs is to be legible, on its own terms, through its own data. When agencies can see what FM actually contributes, in uptime, energy performance, user experience, the function stops being background noise. It becomes something worth arguing for in a budget meeting. Something worth building a career in.

Singapore manages one of the most complex and dense built environments in the world. The facilities that underpin our productivity, our sustainability targets, and our daily quality of life do not run themselves. They are run by professionals who were never taught to say so loudly.

Our national wage data captures what the market recognises as a profession. After fifteen years, FM still hasn't made that case clearly enough to be counted. That is not a problem for anyone else to fix. It is ours.

About Jake Chia

Jake Chia is a Deputy Director at JTC and has spent more than a decade overseeing Facilities Management (FM) procurement, planning, and operations across both public and private sectors. Over the years, he has led major procurement and transformation projects, including Whole of Government FM initiatives, FM transformation implementation, and the development of national guides that shape how agencies approach FM today.

His work spans strategic planning, contract redesign, performance frameworks, and data-driven decision making. Drawing from experience across diverse portfolios, from industrial estates to community facilities and large operational contracts, Jake believes that strong FM systems begins with clear intent and ends with better outcomes for users on the ground. He continues to advocate for practical, sustainable, and forward-looking FM practices that strengthen Singapore’s built environment.