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Workers told to improve as digital tech steams ahead – The Jakarta Post – Jakarta Post


New skills are crucial to prepare Indonesia’s workforce for the rise of the digital economy, as more and more companies roll out training programs to address skillset gaps in the country.

Approximately 10 million novel jobs will emerge by 2030, according to Vivek Lath, associate partner with the local arm of United States consulting firm McKinsey & Company. More jobs would be created than lost should the country engage in an upskilling process, he said.

“Approximately 10 million [new] jobs could be created [that do] not exist right now across different sectors. Digital talents would become more and more important [for companies],” Lath said during a discussion held by The Jakarta Post in collaboration with on-demand services start-up Gojek in Jakarta on Thursday.

Lath said several countries, including Singapore, had implemented best practices to encourage their citizens to gain digital skills.

“For example, Singaporean citizens will have some money in their pocket [from the government] to upskill themselves. Their government is also improving the curriculum and working with digital companies to help [citizens] build digital capabilities,” he stated.

A McKinsey & Company report titled Automation and the Future of Work in Indonesia found that 23 million jobs could be displaced by automation by 2030, but 27 million to 46 million new jobs could be created in the same period if Indonesians learn new skills.

Reskilling, therefore, is key as IBM’s Institute for Business Value noted that 120 million workers from the world’s 12 largest economies, including Indonesia, may need to participate in reskilling programs in the next three years as a result of automation enabled by artificial intelligence.

“People must develop skills that give them advantages over machines, namely meta skills, including learning aspirations and self-direction, soft skills, such as creativity and critical thinking, and hard skills, such as software management and big data analytics,” Lath told the audience.

He called for stronger collaboration among stakeholders including employees, the government, employers, educational institutions and industry associations to capture the opportunities provided by the digital economy.

Indonesia’s digital economy is well on track to dominate Southeast Asia with a market value expected to triple to US$130 billion by 2025 from $40 billion in 2019, according to a study conducted by American tech giant Google, Singaporean holding company Temasek and management consulting firm Bain & Company.

Google Indonesia marketing head Veronica Utami said during the discussion that skillset gaps needed to be resolved, including through upskilling programs, to take advantage of the potential. She also cited several sources, including the Economist Intelligence Unit and World Bank data, which stated that Indonesia had an undersupply of 9 million talents from 2015 to 2030.

“There is a need for tech-savvy workers not just within the tech and start-up world, but across different sectors, from automotive to oil and gas and consumer goods,” said Veronica.

Google Indonesia launched an initiative called Grow with Google in November as an umbrella for its various training programs for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), job seekers and developers, among others.

Meanwhile, Gojek vice president for data science Syafri Bahar said there was a huge gap between supply and demand of talent in Indonesia, as Communications and Information Ministry data showed a deficit of around 600,000 talents in the tech sector.

“Retraining and reskilling programs are part of a survival kit; this [600,000 talents gap] is the size of the gap we need to fill in as we need a coordinated effort to tackle the talent deficit,” Syafri said. Gojek, he added, was working together with other companies, such as start-up accelerator Digitaraya, to enhance human resources with digital skills.

The program with Digitaraya, named Gojek Xcelerate, provides six-month training for 20 selected start-ups. It involves Google’s start-up acceleration program Google Developers Launchpad, McKinsey & Company and Swiss banking giant UBS.

“We are going to need more initiatives like this and start thinking about this problem,” he said.

More and more technology companies, such as US tech giants Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and China’s Alibaba and Huawei, are rolling out digital training programs in the country to address skillset gaps.

Since July, Huawei is working with the Manpower Ministry to provide a transceiver station and microwave vocational training program for 1,000 participants in Bekasi, West Java.

Amazon’s cloud computing arm AWS and its rival Alibaba Cloud have each initiated cloud technology courses. Meanwhile, Google claims to have provided digital training for 1 million SMEs in Indonesia from 2015 to 2018 through various programs, and Facebook has provided training for SMEs, communities and students in 15 cities since 2018 to help them utilize the company’s platforms in productive ways.

The Finance Ministry, meanwhile, is in the process of formulating regulations for tax incentives for research and development (R&D) programs, allowing companies that conduct R&D activities to cut their taxable income by up to 300 percent of the cost of their R&D activities.





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