Indonesia Lack of Thousands of Engineers Amidst Infrastructure Development

By : Ahmad Fadli And Aldi Firhand. A | Sunday, May 13 2018 - 21:37 IWST

Illustration of Infrastructure Development (Ist)

INDUSTRY.co.id - Jakarta - The Indonesian Engineers Association (PII) said that the abundance of infrastructure projects, especially the electricity sector being built in Indonesia, is inversely proportional to the national supply of engineers.

Vice Chairman of PII Heru Dewanto said Indonesia has the potential to experience a shortage of 280 thousand engineers in the next five years. In fact, the possibility of shortage of 650 thousand engineers in the next 10 years.

According to him, the minimal supply of skilled labor is a problem faced by the electricity sector, in addition to regulatory issues.

"When the opportunity is in sight, we are still focusing on human resource issues, especially the number of engineers," he said recently, the number of engineering students is only 14 percent of the total number of students in Indonesia.

Of that amount, 50 percent learn computer engineering, but of these, only half work in the engineering sector.

"This means that engineering graduates who work in the field of engineering is only 3.5 percent," he added.

Advocacy on Coal The government is considered to have adopted the right policy by allocating a mix of energy sources for electricity in Indonesia.

The energy mix policy puts coal as the most widely used energy source by 50 percent.

Heru reminded the government to continue advocating for this policy. For, even though industry players have made technological innovations for the use of more environmentally friendly coal, criticism of coal continues to be present.

"In the future, we expect the government to advocate more on energy mix policy despite the many challenges in its implementation," he said.

The government is also trying to maximize the use of coal in the country. Coal consumption throughout 2017 in Indonesia is 97 million tons, still below the target of 121 million tons.

To that end, Heru supports the government's efforts to allow coal producers to allocate 25 percent of their total production to the domestic market.