Singapore’s newest MRT station welcomed its first passengers last December, capping over two decades of meticulous planning and engineering.
Punggol Coast MRT station on the North East Line will serve over 28,000 employees and 12,000 students in the fast-growing Punggol Digital District, while cutting travel time to the city centre for daily commuters.
For Yeong Li Qian, who was part of the team behind this milestone, every addition to the network represents more than steel and concrete.
“Each station is a reflection of the dedication and foresight of generations of public officers who came before me, each one working tirelessly to build up Singapore’s public transport network with the future in mind,” says the 34-year-old deputy director at the Ministry of Transport’s (MOT) public transport (rail) division.
When he first joined MOT in 2024, he was immediately struck by the passion of his colleagues in the Land Transport Authority (LTA), particularly the veterans who have witnessed the MRT system’s evolution from a modest 6km line in 1987 to today’s extensive network stretching around 270km.
“You can see that they are thinking every day about how to make the system better – they genuinely want to make a positive impact on the lives of our commuters,” says Li Qian.
Such passion has translated into an acute awareness of their heavy responsibility to maintain service standards for millions of commuters daily – a commitment that drives the ministry’s work.
An engineer by training, Li Qian studied industrial engineering at Beijing’s Tsinghua University before pursuing his master’s in systems engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States.
Being awarded the Public Service Commission Scholarship in 2009 enabled him to gain exposure to these two different cultures.
“The most valuable lesson from my studies was learning to live in different societies and working with people from different cultural backgrounds,” he says. “I learnt to keep an open mind, navigate complexity and ambiguity, and build strong relationships with the people around me.”
This experience proved invaluable when his career began at the Ministry of Defence’s defence policy office in 2017. There, he was part of a team tasked with managing Singapore’s bilateral defence relations with other countries – an experience that honed his skills in strategic planning and stakeholder management.
He worked on the joint development of the expanded Shoalwater Bay Training Area in Australia – a training area five times the size of Singapore, which supports the Singapore Armed Forces’ overseas training.
A stint at the Ministry of Manpower followed, where he was part of a team overseeing the formulation and calibration of foreign workforce policies. The posting taught Li Qian a crucial lesson about policy implementation: Even the best-designed policies may not succeed without effective communication with the people they impact.
“We had to sit down with stakeholders and understand their concerns. And you can’t just walk into a room and start engaging – it takes time to build trust,” he says.
This understanding reinforced a key lesson from his university professors: “Behind every complex system are real people with human behaviours that don’t always follow logical patterns,” he explains.
“You can’t just design policies based purely on data. The human element – how people actually think, feel and behave – has to be built into the design from the start.”
After five years in the public service, Li Qian was seconded in 2022 to ShopBack, an e-commerce platform, as a product manager. The move was facilitated by the public service division to help scholarship holders gain valuable private sector exposure.
“I had to learn SQL (structured query language) from scratch in my first two weeks,” he says. The steep learning curve came with adapting to a different environment, where he had to work alongside software engineers and data analysts to manage a commercial product for the first time.
Li Qian added that the experience gave him fresh insights into how the private sector approaches problem solving and decision making.
In 2024, he returned to the public service, bringing with him a fresh perspective and new skill sets to a new role in the public transport division at MOT.
“I learnt to keep an open mind, navigate complexity and ambiguity, and build strong relationships with the people around me.”
– Yeong Li Qian, recipient of the Public Service Commission Scholarship
Following in the footsteps of pioneer public officers who laid the foundation for the Singapore of today, Li Qian is continuing their legacy – working on the development of our public transport network to serve Singapore’s next chapter of growth.
“We’re not done yet,” he notes, adding that transport planning is a perpetual process of working with multiple stakeholders to anticipate and meet Singapore’s evolving needs.
One of the key projects Li Qian is working on is the cross-border Rapid Transit System (RTS) Link connecting Singapore and Johor Bahru. With a peak capacity of up to 10,000 passengers per hour per direction, the RTS Link is targeted to commence passenger service by December 2026. It will cut travel time for daily commuters, a boon for economic activity between both cities.
At the same time, public officers at MOT and LTA are already focused on delivering upcoming new rail lines like the Jurong Region Line and the Cross Island Line.
“A lot of what we’re planning for today will only be realised decades later,” he says. “That’s the scale of the forward planning that we’re engaging in. We have to start now because that’s how long it takes to build for future generations.”
| About the Public Service Commission Scholarship The Public Service Commission (PSC) Scholarship is Singapore’s premier government scholarship, awarded to outstanding individuals with a passion for public service. It offers scholars the opportunity to pursue their studies at top universities worldwide, entry into the Public Service Leadership Programme (the central leadership development programme in the Singapore Public Service), and exposure to diverse experiences through structured rotations across government ministries and agencies. |
This article is brought to you by the Public Service Commission.
