Indonesia is short of skilled engineers. A country with a population of 250 million, it currently has 57 million skilled workers. It needs 113 million by 2030. Indonesia has an annual shortage of around 30,000 engineering graduates per year. This shortage is a hurdle to infrastructure development and growth of the manufacturing industry.

Skills shortage and productivity is hampering government’s agenda to carry out multi-billion dollars worth of infrastructure development, covering ports, airports to highways and new power plants.

Challenges:

1. More than half of the engineering graduates produced by Indonesia go on to careers in other fields, like banking, because those jobs provide better incomes;

2. Indonesian graduates in a variety of fields take unrelated jobs not because they pay more, but because they cannot find work in their chosen profession;

3. Deep problems with the country’s educational system. Just 43 percent of Indonesians have completed primary school.  A June study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that looked at 34 countries found that Indonesians working in Jakarta scored last in literacy, numeracy and problem solving.

More news: Indonesia’s dire need for engineers is going unmet