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Tourism polytechnic graduates must be successful entrepreneurs: Minister

Currently, tourism takes the fourth place when it comes to foreign exchange contribution. Compared to other industries, tourism is valued at 9.3 percent while its growth is the highest with 13 percent.

  (Pesona Indonesia)
Jakarta
Thu, September 21, 2017

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Tourism polytechnic graduates must be successful entrepreneurs: Minister Percussion sounds: Wayan Kantun shows a French tourist how to play a traditional gamelan instrument in his stall. The farmer lives near the terrace trekking area and sells young coconuts to get additional income. (JP/Anggara Mahendra)

257 students of Makassar Tourism Polytechnic recently graduated with 80 percent had secured jobs post-graduation. Additionally, the highest GPA achieved from this batch was 3.92 from the scale of 0 to 4. The Polytechnic itself has so far produced 3,790 graduates, mostly working in the tourism industry.

Tourism minister Arief Yahya was happy about the news, he encouraged all the graduates to work together in making tourism industry the number one foreign exchange contributor in the country.

Currently, tourism takes the fourth place when it comes to foreign exchange contribution. Compared to other industries, tourism is valued at 9.3 percent while its growth is the highest with 13 percent.

Read also: New 'ghost' orchid species discovered on Java

It’s a stark contrast to other industries such as oil, gas, coal and palm oil which growth is negative. The marketing budget for tourism is relatively low too as it only requires only two percent from foreign exchange.

“Tourism industry is closely related to human resources and the ones who educate these human resources are tourism schools such as Makassar Tourism Polytechnic […] Be a great tourism human resource who champions for these three characteristics: Character, competency, and collaboration,” said Arief.

Arief also motivated the graduates to become an entrepreneur, “Only by being a successful entrepreneur your salary could be higher than a general manager or a chief executive. Successful alumni will improve their alma mater as well,” he added.

Makassar Tourism Polytechnic head Muhadjir Suni said that a five-star hotel is going to be built in 2018. The budget for the first stage of the construction has been prepared by the tourism minister for 64 billion rupiahs, apart from serving the public, the hotel is also slated to be the training ground for students who want to take an internship.

Other than English, currently the school also offers other foreign language courses such as Japanese, French, Korean and Mandarin. (asw)



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