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Skills gap: Why education alone is not enough to land you a job in Indonesia
Unemployment rate for graduates of vocational high schools, which are meant to tailor students for specific jobs, is most alarming at 8.63 percent in February 2019, compared with 6.24 percent for university student graduates and 6.78 percent for high school graduates.
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Two prospective job seekers see job openings during the job fair at the Mega Career Expo in Balai Kartini, Jakarta, in this file photo dated Aug. 23, 2013. (JP/Nurhayati)
B
orn in North Kalimantan's Tanjung Selor, architecture student Diandra Faradina, 23, has come to realize that she has learned more usable skills from her three freelance jobs — none of which had relevance to her major — than from her formal education.
With only a year left before graduation, she has little hope she can find a decent job from her degree, considering that many of her friends have either taken jobs totally unrelated to their majors or have opted to become civil servants out of desperation to earn a living.
At worst, other graduates remain jobless several months after graduating, she said, forcing them to move out of town to seek employment.
“Meanwhile, schools are expensive and a lot of us have to take up side jobs to pay the expenses. But well-paid architectural jobs are so hard to apply for, especially in a small town like mine,” said Diandra, who has studied in Malang, East Java, since 2014.
Diandra’s qualms are shared by thousands of other recent university graduates in Indonesia, with a Statistics Indonesia (BPS) report showing that 6.24 percent of the country’s 6.82 million unemployed individuals are university graduates.
The unemployment rate for graduates of vocational high schools, which are meant to train students for specific jobs, is most alarming at 8.63 percent of the workforce in February 2019, followed by high school graduates at 6.78 percent.
