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Every morning, as the staff bus takes Mr Thaddeus Chew and his colleagues across the Sentosa Gateway to the island, the speed limit drops to 50kmh. Mr Chew has experienced it more than a thousand times, and still, each time, he feels a quiet sense of anticipation as the island comes into view.
“It puts you in a good place to start the day,” he says.
As senior assistant director in the experience development division at Sentosa Development Corporation (SDC), Mr Chew is helping to determine what the island will look like for the next generation – a task that requires thinking not in quarters or years, but in decades.
The 38-year-old is one of the key figures in SDC’s work on the Greater Sentosa Master Plan, a long-horizon effort to integrate Sentosa and Brani Island into an elevated leisure destination.
“We are not just planning for today,” he says. “We are envisioning what’s to come for the next 20 to 30 years for the new Sentosa.”
This kind of visionary planning, Mr Chew reflects, is possible only because of the breadth of experience he has accumulated across his 14 years at SDC. A marketing graduate, he joined in 2011, drawn by a passion for tourism, and has since moved through six job rotations in the company, spanning strategy, business and project management.
“The perspectives you gain are so different,” he says of his job rotations. “Understanding what keeps the operations team up at night, versus how to develop strategies at a broader level, is the kind of exposure that shapes how you think.”
A stint at subsidiary Mount Faber Leisure Group (MFLG) gave him a commercial operator’s perspective. There, he oversaw projects from concept to construction, including SkyHelix Sentosa and the Central Beach Bazaar, both part of Sentosa’s wider offering, which attracts millions of visitors each year.
SDC, which functions as the promoter, developer and operator of Sentosa and accounts for some 20 per cent of Singapore’s tourism workforce, operates across 14 specialised divisions.
Here, staff are involved not just in policy and planning, but also in decisions that directly affect operations, revenue and visitor experience.
At the 10-year mark of his career, Mr Chew was jointly sponsored for an Executive Master of Business Administration at Singapore Management University by MFLG and SDC. He completed the full-time programme while raising two young children and expecting a third.
“My bosses and teammates were very understanding. They gave me peace of mind to study,” he says. “The modules can get quite stressful, but that support really helped me focus.”
It is this long-term investment in people that has helped earn SDC a place among Singapore’s 250 best employers, as ranked by global research firm Statista in collaboration with The Straits Times.
Drawing on cross-functional experience from his job rotations, Mr Chew (centre) brings both insight and passion to shaping Sentosa’s future.
PHOTO: SENTOSA DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION
Across the office, Ms Aileen So embodies the younger energy SDC is channelling into its workforce. The 26-year-old executive in operations planning and development interned with SDC’s sustainability team before taking up a full-time role after graduating with an engineering degree.
During a major oil spill that affected Sentosa’s beaches in June 2024, Ms So served as secretariat for the incident management team, coordinating daily situation reports across more than 700 personnel from agencies, contractors and volunteer groups.
The swift response saw the beaches reopen two weeks ahead of schedule, allowing both beachfront businesses to operate fully and guests to enjoy the natural beauty of the shores once more.
“In operations, we are not just desk-bound. We go off-site to understand the guest experience,” says Ms So. “We definitely want to know what we can do better to connect the dots and drive meaningful change across the organisation.”
Ms Aileen So (centre) is part of a younger generation contributing to the island’s evolving vision.
PHOTO: SENTOSA DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION
Ms So was also one of the key leads in a trial of fully autonomous road-sweeping robots. These electric, driverless machines use sensors and intelligent navigation to clean outdoor routes without human intervention, reducing manual sweeping effort by around 20 per cent to 30 per cent.
Her work extends to using predictive data analytics for crowd management and trialling drone video analytics to deploy manpower more precisely during large-scale events like the annual New Year’s Eve countdown.
Amid the demands of the role, there are quieter moments. On some evenings, she photographs the hornbills that glide between the trees outside her office and sends the pictures to friends.
Likewise, on his days off, Mr Chew sometimes takes his children for a ride on the cable car. Even during his downtime, he admits he cannot quite stop himself from noticing how guest experiences could be improved. And his wife has learnt to catch him at it, too.
“She always tells me, ‘Hey, you’re not working on weekends’,” he says. “But I think that level of awareness and seeing what could be better shows how much I genuinely care about making every visitor’s experience better.”
