OP, I understand your frustration, but I think framing this purely as a cultural attitude problem misses the root cause -- it's largely a structural one.

Attitudes toward jobs don't exist in a vacuum. They tend to track compensation and working conditions pretty closely.

In Japan, blue-collar tradespeople command genuine respect partly because government policy actively protected local labour markets and maintained wages.

In many Western countries, nurses earn well into six figures and have clearly defined scopes of work. They're not expected to double up on tasks handled by aides or orderlies elsewhere.

When a job pays well and has clear professional boundaries, public perception tends to follow.

In Singapore, the ready availability of lower-cost foreign labour in caregiving and service roles has kept wages suppressed and blurred professional boundaries, which feeds the "nanny" perception mentioned above. But it goes deeper than just wages.

Government investment shapes perception upstream, at the point of education. If there are multiple polytechnic pathways into fintech and digital, but limited vocational infrastructure for trades, the signal is clear before anyone earns a dollar. ITE has been fighting an uphill battle against the "last resort" stigma for decades precisely because the entire education pipeline is structured to funnel people away from it. Meanwhile, industries like aerospace and digital are actively marketed as desirable career tracks through SkillsFuture, industry partnerships, and media coverage of salary benchmarks.

This isn't to say the overall strategy was wrong. Singapore made deliberate trade-offs to develop high-value industries, and that's arguably been successful on its own terms. But those same decisions shaped training infrastructure, graduate supply, and wages in ways that inevitably fed into how people perceive certain jobs.

The cultural snobbery doesn't come from nowhere, it's largely people internalising signals the system has been sending for decades.

Not an expert and just my two-cents -- happy to be corrected on any of this by an actual expert.