Homegrown tech giant Gojek has taken major steps to address the tech talent shortage in Indonesia, launching a training program, called GoAcademy, and cultivating knowledge-sharing culture to help the tech industry grow.
With the emerging digital economy, Indonesia must keep up with the growing demand for great tech talent, especially to make the industry competitive at the global level. But the country is facing an alarming tech talent shortage. According to a 2018 World Bank report, Indonesia is projected to experience a digital skills shortage of 9 million between 2015 and 2030.
Consulting firm Korn Ferry Indonesia Indonesia also reports that the country will lack highly skilled workers in the digital technology sector. The skilled labor deficit will stand at 1.3 million by 2020 and grow to 3.8 million by 2030. The impending tech talent deficit can hamper the growth of the digital industry in Indonesia, it concludes.
Decacorn Gojek has acted quickly to solve the alarming talent crunch by launching training programs through its GoAcademy. Since its launch in 2018, GoAcademy has coached more than 200 promising college students. On a quest to nurture young tech talent, GoAcademy has at least four types of main programs, aimed at its new employees and college students.
All aboard!
To welcome its newly hired engineers, Gojek has a three-month onboarding program, called Engineering Bootcamp. The onboard program will prepare the new batch of junior engineers – which mostly comprise fresh graduates and engineers with less than three years’ experience – with hands-on practice.
At their campus, the young programmers might complete small-scale projects to complete their assignments. Gojek, however, is not like your average college project assignment. Gojek offers more than 20 on-demand services, including ride-hailing and food delivery services. The app has tens of millions of active users in 207 cities in five Southeast Asian countries, with more than 2 million partner drivers and almost 400,000 food merchants.
“We’re talking about a completely different level here,” says Giri Kuncoro, a senior software engineer and programming coach at Gojek. “That’s why we need a robust software system that can handle the traffic – that’s something these young engineers might have never done in the classroom.”
The mentorship is given by senior software engineers and senior leaders at Gojek. There is one session in which Gojek founder and CEO Nadiem Makarim delivers a speech before the young programmers.
The onboarding programs serve not only to provide the new hires with technical skills but also to develop their soft skills and leadership. Gojek tries to replace the stereotype that programming is a solitary job with a culture of openness and knowledge sharing.
That is one thing that Giri loves about working at Gojek.
After spending eight years studying and working abroad, Giri decided to return home and help advance the tech industry in Indonesia, which is still relatively new. His firsthand experience in the tech sector in the United States and Japan has broadened his perspective on software programming and culture in the fast-growing industry.
For instance, Giri notices that Silicon Valley, home to many successful tech companies in the US, favors a culture of openness and knowledge sharing through ubiquitous tech meetups and communities. These events are open to anyone looking to learn more about the tech world.
Gojek shares a similar culture that encourages young programmers to publish the lessons, puts them in problem-solving discussions and teaches them how to present and defend their arguments.
“We want our programmers to master not only the technical skills but also interpersonal skills,” says Giri. These skills will be useful because, at Gojek, software programmers have to work in pairs or groups when building the new code. That involves well-engaged technical discussions and debates.
“I can easily recognize how the corporate culture in Gojek is aligned with the open culture in Silicon Valley,” Giri says. The homegrown tech giant is eager to cultivate the culture of knowledge sharing on a national scale.
Gojek, moreover, encourages all of its engineers to share what they have gained at the boot camp in written posts on Gojek’s blog.
Lessons from world-class engineers
Gojek doesn’t miss out on students’ enthusiasm either. The tech company has launched a three-month internship, known as GoSquads, which will expose college students to world-class engineers. The internship is held twice a year: mid-year and year-end, referred to the summer and winter program, respectively.
Selected interns will take part in drills and group assignments to hone their coding skills. The hands-on tasks are supposed to introduce the practical skills of a real software engineer that might not be given in the classroom.
Self-taught programmers are always welcome. Gojek selects the interns regardless of their majors. Interested candidates might study in unrelated majors, such as economics or biology but if they have broad knowledge of software programming and sufficient coding skills, they have a chance to get an internship at Gojek.
There is no minimum age requirement to apply for the internship program, although the accepted applicants are mostly as young as those in the freshman year of college. “Once we accepted a young college student, who was just in his second semester,” Giri recalls. “He had adequate knowledge of software engineering and demonstrated a high level of learning agility.”
The willingness and ability to learn something and quickly adapt to new challenges are among the traits that Gojek looks to foster in its environment.
Among the GoSquads alumni is Andri Ginting, who got an internship when he was in his seventh semester at Brawijaya University in Malang.
“I cherished my internship experience there and I also really like its culture of openness,” Andri says. He says that prior to joining GoSquads, he was shy to ask questions for fear of saying the wrong things or looking unknowledgeable.
“At Gojek I was taught it was okay to make mistakes because it was only then that we could learn and become better,” he says.
When his internship ended, Andri still maintained close relationships with his mentors at Gojek and kept in touch with them to consult about his ideas for an undergraduate thesis topic. After graduating from college, he applied to Gojek and landed a job as a junior software engineer.
Such stories are common. As Gojek seeks to train aspiring programmers and data scientists through GoSquads, many of its graduates seek to return to work at the company which has coached them over the holiday internship program. So far, GoSquads have trained three batches of around 12 interns.
Another unique experience of being an intern at Gojek is the opportunity to meet and work with people of different nationalities, such as Indian, Singaporean, South African and Ukrainian. At the diverse and multicultural workplace, the interns have a great chance to hone their English and learn how to navigate cultural differences.
College coaching
Gojek also offers a mini version of a boot camp for college students. Upscale, an annual two-day program, features a tight schedule of coding exercises. The quick and intense boot camp is intended to cater to the needs of the brightest and most competitive college students in Indonesia.
“We want to teach the participants that when you write a program, you have to make sure that your code is readable for other people,” says Giri. “Most of the time, code is meant to be read – not just written – because we want to pass the code to the rest of the team so they can develop the programs in the future.”
In an attempt to reach curious college students, Giri and other senior engineers at Gojek frequently travel around the country to organize workshops on engineering and data science right at their campuses. The two-week workshop program, called Collab for Student Community or Student Academy, allows students to get insight from seasoned software engineers and data scientists.
The company has held workshops at various top universities, such as the University of Indonesia in Depok, Binus University in Jakarta and Brawijaya University in Malang.
To foster its corporate culture of knowledge sharing, Gojek occasionally holds GoTalk, which offers insightful speeches from Gojek’s top engineers. The company also invites speakers from other tech giants, such as Google and Facebook, to speak at GoTalk.
