Airlangga: Pre-Employment Program Encourages Increased Skills Of Indonesian Workers

Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs Airlangga Hartarto said that the Pre-Employment program is a government program that provides large-scale training. Prior to Pre-Employment, the training from all Ministries/Agencies only amounted to around 870 thousand people per year.

"However, Pre-Employment is proven to be an initial large-scale effort, using market and inclusive mechanisms. Pre-employment collaborates with various parties, the government and the private sector to make this happen," he said in his official statement, Friday, November 24.

In 2045, it is projected that the number of Indonesian workers will reach 233 million, and based on data from AT Kearney (2023) it is stated that 50 percent of Indonesian workers need to be trained.

This means that there are around 117 million Indonesian workers who need to be trained to achieve this target. Meanwhile, the number of Pre-Employment beneficiaries has only reached 17.5 million people, so the number of Pre-Employment recipients is currently relatively small when compared to the training needs of all workers.

Airlangga said the government had established a digital center in SEZ Nongsa Batam and Apple Academy, then there was the Merdeka Campus program, one of which was in collaboration with IBM Academy which offered learning classes for Hybrid Cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

"The government has issued a super deduction tax, because we cannot move alone, but we need to cooperate with the private sector," he said.

However, the training center has limited capacity or quota, while through Pre-Employment it can train millions online. This is in line to respond to hybrid work trends.

Regarding skills, which emphasize that education or degrees are important, but skill development is the main thing to be able to work well in the workplace.

Pre-employment is an experiment that has succeeded in answering three main points related to the Government's policies that can be done to prepare future skills of the Indonesian workforce, namely skills-first politicians, namely focusing on skills instead of titles or degree, then supporting hybrid ways of working (WFO and WFH combinations), and developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) skills.

Airlangga told how the beginning of the Pre-Employment Card, which started without definition, was only based on an assignment from the President to create a training program for millions of people digitally/online, so that a Pre-Employment Card startup had to be made from scratch.

However, the progress of the Pre-Employment Card Program is constrained by the Covid-19 pandemic so that the program is changed to semi-social assistance.

"This is always done by the Government, coincidentally the Coordinating Ministry for the Economy is quite persistent, apart from the Pre-Employment Card we also oversee the creation of the Job Creation Law. So, what is important is the same resilience as we build startups," Airlangga concluded.