Living in Indonesia as an Engineering graduate

I was graduated in September 2018 with honors, I thought I was a quite successful student when I was in college. However, after I looked for a job, I learned so many things in life. For example, Although I pursued my degree from a prestigious university in Indonesia, it was so hard to get a job as an engineer in Indonesia, but the question…. why? The first one is that our industry is such a pity. I got a job from one of the top car manufacturers in the world. Nevertheless, I just got a boring job there, I just checked the quality of some parts which I thought it was easy and I thought I did not need a four-year degree just to know that. Second, In Indonesia, we just follow procedures from the mother company, there was no innovation for building something from zero. For me, it was a big problem because in university I solved complicated things based on fundamental knowledge. Third, In manufacturing companies in Indonesia, I saw that people are negligent about their jobs and they were so convoluted about happening issues because they did not know how to solve that.

Thus, I saw two problems here, our people and our regulations. If you have ever seen the statistics about engineering graduates from top schools like ITB, ITS, UI, and UGM, you will see a sad truth. The top students of these schools usually won’t work as engineers although they have an engineering degree. In my opinion, there are some reasons such as salary, job satisfaction, opportunities to grow, etc. In Indonesia, working with SMK graduates is very hard because they do not know about technical things and so adamant in my opinion. Another one is that our work as engineers lack innovation because we just do operational work.

However, to be a developed country we need to produce our technology to produce something. It is hard to rely on just service industries, we need manufacturing companies such as automotive and its parts, paper, chemicals, etc. We can just rely on foreign investments to make job opportunities, why? because they do not have any moral obligation to our country and I think that it is fair because they are private sector. On the other hand, our RnD budget is too low for doing research, I know if the RnD budget gets higher other sectors will suffer too. For this reason, I believe that RnD is an investment. The government just needs to fund until the prototype before mass production. Then, VCs can fund companies to build their plants. Furthermore, I hope the private sector from Indonesia can contribute to funding RnD and collaborate with universities to conduct RnD in various fields of technologies. Thus, there is an integration between government, universities, and the private sector. I previously read a book from Satya Nadella ‘hit refresh’, in his book, he said that developing countries should use their resources (people, natural resources, etc) and not rely on foreign investments. I strongly agree with his statement as I described before. I hope the government sees this as a problem and they will try to solve these problems.

Rendi.

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