It seems that the appointment of the new Minister of Communication and Information as well as the establishment of new creative economy agency have driven people’s mind away from one of most actual fundamental issues that should be fixed ASAP: the human resource regeneration. I know that infrastructure and technology are two crucial things to be thought of, but, hey, ask any startup out there and you’ll find out that actually it is the lack of available proper human resource that becomes their most anticipated issue.
Programmers, designers, and marketing officers, from entry level to management and executive are the most wanted positions that IT companies, be it startups or enterprises, look for. The scarcity of these talents make them cost even more. While this is really positive for those talents, it would serve as one of obstacles to the fast growing Indonesian technology-based creative industry in the long run.
One of causes of this condition is the lack of quality IT graduates who have proper knowledge and skills on programming. There are definitely some bright stars, but their number is much less than the total number of IT graduates who graduate each and every year. In result, one IT company would steal the talents from another, which indirectly take the demands of such people to the next level and make their value and expected salary keep increasing.
It would be wiser if the private companies can work together with the government in enhancing the quality of education for vocational school and college students through programming, design and other related training. Even though some organizations and institutions have already worked on that, it still needs a massive implementation of the system to meet the market’s massive demand.
Well, how can our startups be world-class if they have no engineer in the first place?
