Hong Meng graduated with a Mechanical Engineering honours degree from the National University of Singapore in 1991 before embarking on a distinguished military career in the Singapore Armed Forces. He started his career as an Artillery officer, and has taken up key appointments in both command and staff positions in his 30-year career before retiring as a Colonel in 2015.  

 

As an Artillery officer, Mr Sim has had extensive operational and management experience through stints such as Battery Commander, Senior Tactics Instructor at the School of Artillery and Operations Officer at Headquarters Artillery.  He earned a distinguished US Warfighter award in 1998 while attending the Field Artillery Officers Advanced Course at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and followed shortly in 2000 with a Distinguished Graduate award at the Singapore Command and Staff College.  He was appointed Battalion Commander in the Singapore Artillery. During his tour, he led the Battalion to earn the title of Best Artillery Unit in 2003. 
 
Mr Sim took up a personnel management role to manage an Army Division’s human resources comprising over 20,000 men and women where he was responsible for the entire personnel life cycle from recruitment, personnel development and performance management, succession planning to exit management of each and every individual. The success of his work was recognised with the achievement of ISO9001:2000 certification.  He later led the School of Manpower, as her Commanding Officer, to achieve Singapore Quality Class certification in 2006.  
 
In 2010, he partnered key stakeholders in implementing an enterprise-wide HR system in 2010 to replace several legacy systems across the Ministry of Defence and Singapore Armed Forces.  In his role as the Head of the Army HR Transformation Branch, he further collaborated with leading industry and education providers such as SHRI, Nanyang Polytechnic and NUS to establish a new SAF HR Institute that offered professional courses to both military and civilian employees. 

As an earnest lifelong learner, he attended the Executive Programme in International Management with NUS-Stanford and completed the Global Executive MBA with INSEAD.  He put his knowledge into practice at the height of his military career, when the Mr Sim was appointed as the Deputy Director (Personnel Management), Manpower Division taking charge of a multi-disciplinary team to review the Ministry’s arrears management system.

 

He also obtained a Graduate Diploma in Leadership and Organisational Development (Civil Service College) during this period prior to assuming his next appointment as Commander, Central Manpower Base (CMPB), where he was responsible for enforcing National Service enlistment.