During my past five years working in the digital industry, my experience has taught me one thing: The digital economy has the ability to create high-quality jobs, but only a few people have access to them. As we see significant waves of workers pursuing on-demand, low-skilled jobs such as app-based ojek (motorcycle taxi) driver, there has not been any significant change in terms of who benefits from high-skill, high-education jobs such as programming.

A quick look at the employee demography of the four Indonesian unicorns (Go-Jek, Bukalapak, Traveloka and Tokopedia) shows that 40 percent of their white-collar positions are filled by graduates from three universities: University of Indonesia (UI), the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) and Bina Nusantara University.

Inequality is made worse by the companies’ go-to solution when they run out of local talent: hire foreign workers or establish an office overseas.

It is unfortunate that what might seem like a justified, rational business decision is going to hurt the local workforce in the long run.

The digital talent shortage is a real problem and many stakeholders indeed are making efforts to close the skills gap. The government, for instance, is revitalizing vocational education and training, the National Apprenticeship Program and Digital Talent Scholarship through the Communications and Information Ministry.

Moreover, alternative education providers such as Hacktiv8, Purwadhika Startup & Coding School, Binar Academy, IYKRA, most recently, RevoU, have popped up. However, there are two things employers themselves can do further to address the talent shortage: inclusive hiring and reskilling.

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