Vocational Revitalization Not Optimal

KOMPAS/PRIYOMBODO

A student works on parts of a motorcycle on Friday (10/8/2018) at state vocational school SMK 7 in Tangerang regency, Banten, which has established a partnership with PT Astra Honda Motor. This vocational education is expected to produce graduates who are skilled, characterized and capable to meet the needs of human resources in the industrial sector.

JAKARTA, KOMPAS — Although millennials make up half of Indonesia\'s working age population, they possess low skills and productivity and cannot compete with their peers in other countries. They also lose out to robots.

The average years of schooling among Indonesian workers is a mere eight years, from an expectation of more than 12 years. Their skills level and abilities in math, science and reading are also low. Many have also developed childhood stunting (delayed development) before the age of 5, which causes impaired brain and physical development.

Anton J. Supit, the deputy chairman of manpower and industrial relations at the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (Kadin), said that secondary vocational education and professional development training could be a solution to improve their skills.

"With vocational education, they should be able to enter the labor market immediately," he said on Thursday (27/9/2018) in Jakarta. Adequate skills and absorbing the millennial generation into the labor market were the only way to take advantage of the demographic bonus to realize the Indonesia Emas (gold) 2045 program’s goal of achieving an advanced and sustainable economy.

KOMPAS/HERU SRI KUMORO

Mohamad Nasir

Research, Technology and Higher Education Minister Mohamad Nasir said during a visit to the University of Jember in East Java that 88 percent of the Indonesian workforce had schooling only up to senior high school (SMA) or vocational senior high school (SMK), or their equivalent. Therefore, vocational education could prepare them for entering the labor market as well as to set up their own businesses.

Half-hearted

Although it was deemed important, Anton believed that the efforts to improve vocational education were half-hearted. The government and the public still viewed vocational education as second-class education, inferior to public and professional schools. Vocational school graduates often received lower salaries than graduates of public schools, although the former often had better skills than the latter.

Optimal efforts were needed to improve vocational schools in compliance with Presidential Instruction No. 9/2016 on the revitalization of vocational schools within the framework of improving the quality and competitiveness of Indonesia’s human resources. The development vocational school was entirely dependent on local administrations, which had jurisdiction over the management of vocational schools.

As a result, many local administrations built vocational schools before it had teachers, laboratories, workshops and adequate supporting facilities. "The budgets of many vocational schools are inaccurate," said Nailul Faruq, the advocacy and investigation coordinator of the Indonesian Education Monitoring Network.

Many vocational schools also did not support local industries or economic potentials, so that its students could not put their knowledge to practice. For example, multimedia vocational schools were built in areas with an agriculture or marine economy. Their curriculums focused on theory and furthermore, the theory taught in classrooms were outdated, and was unrelated to current developments or to improving the students’ skills.

KOMPAS/HERU SRI KUMORO

Anton J. Supit

"The limited [number of businesses] in the regions means that very few opportunities exist for partnerships between vocational schools and the business and industry," said Saryadi, the vocational alignment and industrial cooperation head at the Education and Culture Ministry.

The absence of strong ties between vocational schools and local businesses and industry has led to high unemployment among vocational school graduates. The unemployment rate among vocational school graduates is the highest among all other education groups.

The October 2017 study of the University of Indonesia’s Demographic Institute recorded the highest unemployment figures among vocational school graduates in computer and informatics engineering, automotive, petroleum, electronics engineering and furniture design.

The vocational school graduates who had found employment were those who had taken additional courses or training, which indicated that vocational education was inefficient and wasteful. "Vocational school graduates are still not suited to meet the needs of industry," said Kadin general chairman Rosan P Roeslani.

Besides supporting local industries, vocational schools should be developed in line with the government’s development policy, and not based on localized trends that were not necessarily suited to broad regional application.

Although the tourism industry was developing in many areas and was in high demand among the millennial generation, the development of vocational schools in manufacturing and agriculture should not be neglected. "The government’s widespread development of infrastructure is encouraging growth in the manufacturing industry, so the demand for supporting workers is also growing," he said.

(TAN/ELN/MZW)