Day 6 - down to work in Solo Technopark

Clockwise from me, Bapak Sutrisno, Candra (our translator),
Tracy and Aban (both IBM)

We spent Tuesday morning meeting with Bapak Sutrisno who heads up the training faculty in Technopark.  Working almost entirely through a translator in 30 degrees of humid heat is tough going but by the end thanks to the patience of Candra and Bapak Sutrisno we had quite a good understanding of it.

Solo Technopark offers 5 training courses all of 9 months duration. Plus 2 additional courses which are partly run in Solo city.

1. Manufacturing - eg spare parts for cars

2. Mechanical welding

3. Automation

4. Textile machine maintenance

5. Mechanical design

The additional courses are:

Basic aircraft structure - 6 months in Solo - 3 months Jakarta

Underwater welding - 2 months duration. No prior welding knowledge necessary.

Students are usually 18 or 19 and have graduated from vocational secondary school - what we would call a tech in Ireland.

Courses cost 7.8m Rupiah (approx EUR480). Students who can’t afford it can get scholarships. 50% of  students receive job offers during their 3 month internship at the end

Employers also visit STP every 3 months to recruit graduates and overall over 90% of STP graduates sucessfully find jobs.
STP puts a big emphasis not just on skills but also on the attitude and discipline that will be expected in the workplace. 

Graduates can expect a starting salary of  2.8 million Rupiah per month (EUR175). It doesn't seem like much but everything is way cheaper here than Ireland eg a taxi the other night cost 9500 Rupiah (59 cent). I rounded it up to 10000 (62 cent)!

Some cows being herded past the window provided a welcome distraction.

We are being asked to look at 2 business problems for the training college - firstly help them to better integrate their IT systems and secondly look at ways in which they can boost their numbers of students.

At lunchtime myself and Aban took a walk to the nearby village and discovered that while the area is quite built up it is also rural.

Goats wander freely everywhere.

A tailor working a foot pedalled sewing machine.

A house with a mango tree at the front.

Clockwise from me: Aban(IBM), Baiu and Candra

(translators) Mas Mafud (IT), Babak Susilo(
Incubation centre manager). In the back ground
is Kotheid our organiser from Pyxera.

Back to work to meet Babak Susilo (we struggle with the similarity of the names) for the afternoon. He runs the incubation centre which provides support services to entrepeneurs.

The biggest problem that the incubation centre has is in helping it's entrepeneurs attract private investment