People managers: State-owned postal service firm PT Pos Indonesia president commissioner Hasnul Suhaimi (left), the dean of Curtin University Malaysia’s Faculty of Business, Jonathan Winterton (second left), the dean of Erasmus University’s Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Steef Van De Velde (second right) and Prasetiya Mulya University professor of human resource management Andreas Budiharjo engage in a discussion on Thursday during a seminar on human capital development in Jakarta
span class="caption">People managers: State-owned postal service firm PT Pos Indonesia president commissioner Hasnul Suhaimi (left), the dean of Curtin University Malaysia’s Faculty of Business, Jonathan Winterton (second left), the dean of Erasmus University’s Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Steef Van De Velde (second right) and Prasetiya Mulya University professor of human resource management Andreas Budiharjo engage in a discussion on Thursday during a seminar on human capital development in Jakarta. The event also marked the launch of Prasetiya Mulya’s global executive program for a master’s degree in management (MM), in collaboration with the RSM. (JP/Dhoni Setiawan)
Amid the ever-changing business climate and global competition, businesspeople and educators have stressed the need for Indonesia to upgrade its human capital to adjust to the more digitized market.
The former president director of telecommunications company XL Axiata, Hasnul Suhaimi, said based on the latest XL Axiata survey involving 1,500 CEOs, the main concern about the future was the availability of key skills in the human capital marketplace.
Hasnul, who is now president commissioner of state postal firm PT Pos Indonesia, said that in the global leadership framework, one of the most important skills was the ability to deal with the uncertainty of and changes in the global market.
“This is similar to what happened to Blue Bird after Uber entered [the business],” he said during the launch of the global executive graduate management program at Prasetiya Mulya University on Thursday.
The country’s largest taxi operator PT Blue Bird saw a 12.9 percent drop in revenue to Rp 4.7 trillion (US$352.5 million) in 2016 from that in 2015. It was caused by a disruption created by ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Grab, which the firm failed to mitigate, Hasnul said.
He also stated that there was a need for human capital wanting to be successful globally to tap into global ideas and detect current digital trends.
However, he said while revealing the study results, the CEOs had found it difficult to acquire a combination of technical skills, global experience, creativity and communication skills, among other things, to thrive as global leaders.
Meanwhile, Malaysian Curtin University’s School of Business dean Jonathan Winterton stressed that business schools played a significant role in preparing business students for competition, including by encouraging global economic awareness and providing internationalized syllabi.
However, the schools must also be able to identify fast-changing trends in the real world, especially in terms of digitalization. “We have to do our best to equip students to cope with the uncertainty, to be able to live with uncertainties, to sort out information and analyze the situation,” Winterton said.
Students should also have the opportunity to practice these skills, he added. The skills will be relevant even with a different kind of form of their respective occupation, which can change over the years.
“They [the skills] are transferable; they will be valuable even in a new context,” he said.
On Thursday, Prasetiya Mulya University launched its global executive graduate management program in collaboration with the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University. It aims to enrich its graduate program by having closer international ties with a reputable global university.
“Accumulated human capital translates into higher productivity through the routinization of new ways of accomplishing things,” said Prasetiya Mulya University rector Djisman Simandjuntak.
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