Ministry outlines steps to global careers for vocational students

The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education has outlined a number of measures that educational institutions and vocational high school (SMK) students can take to pursue global careers.

Director of Vocational High Schools at the Ministry, Arie Wibowo Khurniawan, said that SMK students who aspire to build careers abroad must identify their skills and the countries they intend to work in as early as Grade 10 to ensure thorough preparation.

“This is not an activity that happens suddenly, but a process that must be prepared by every SMK that is committed to entering the global market. Therefore, the preparation but must start from Grade 10, beginning with the student admission process,” Khurniawan said in a webinar here on Friday.

In Grade 10, he continued, schools should strengthen students’ global talent foundation through character education, work discipline, and the introduction of basic foreign language skills relevant to several destination countries.

In Grade 11, educational institutions should strengthen students’ industrial competencies by providing industry-based learning, teaching factory and project-based learning programs, intermediate-level foreign language training, and preparation for competency certification.

Upon entering Grade 12, he added, schools should prepare students through various certifications, ranging from skill set and foreign language certifications to the preparation of documents required for pursuing global careers.

At this stage, he added, educational institutions should also assist SMK students in participating in industrial internship recruitment and job-matching programs in the following year.

“Then in Grade 13, as we now have an additional one-year program, making SMK a 3+1 model, students who already meet the age requirement can prepare the legal documents so that once they turn 18, they are ready to be dispatched to their destination countries,” Khurniawan said.

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