Swiss Skills for Competitiveness (SS4C)

Indonesia continues its upwards trajectory in its social and economic development, with average estimated economic growth at 4.9% in 2024 and 2025. However, some major challenges remain, including the quality of human capital and its supply and demand mismatch. 

Transforming the country’s Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) is part of Indonesian government’s strategic priority agenda to address these challenges. It is especially imperative as the private sector in Indonesia provides over 90% employment opportunities, yet industries often overlook vocational education graduates, primarily due to insufficient industry-relevant skillset. Moreover, pursuing vocational education instead of going to university is a choice only 14% of all tertiary level students made nationwide. This means there is a lot of work to be done, from improving schools’ curriculum to train more skilful graduates to improving lecturers’ qualifications and industry-related experiences. 

The Government of Indonesia answers this challenge by developing a comprehensive approach for skills development, based on the Presidential Decree No. 68 in 2022 on the National Revitalization of Vocational Education and Training. The decree is followed by the implementation of National Strategy on Revitalizing Vocational Education and Training until 2030, which would impact nearly 2,200 tertiary level vocational education institutions and one million students.  

Project Goals

1. Improving competitiveness: Making Indonesian SMEs more competitive on the global market, driven by Indonesian men and women with industry-relevant skills. 
2. Institutionalising dVET key elements in public sector: Supporting meso-level agencies in key ministries in incorporating industry-based curriculum, competent lecturers and trainers, and practical facilities in selected polytechnics based in the program’s working areas. 
3. Supporting and scaling dVET implementation in private sector: Strengthening incentives and capacity for associations, lead companies, and other relevant service providers to provide and scale dVET services in the program’s working areas and selected sectors. 
4. Building enabling environment: Encouraging collaboration among key dVET actors at national and subnational levels to improve dVET and private sector competitiveness, with stronger connections with Swiss experts and institutions.  

Expected Results

1. Improving overall TVET ecosystem that builds private sector competitiveness.
2. By improving men and women VET graduates’ skills to become more industry-relevant, the SS4C program aims to strengthen the competitiveness of Indonesian private sector, particularly SMEs, in the global market.

The program’s successes by 2027 will be reflected by key results below:

• Gradual annual increase of the male and female VET graduates employed by industry leading to 10% increase.
• Gradual annual increase in employers’ satisfaction rate on the relevance of skills, competencies, and attitudes of the graduates leading to 4.5 out of 5 scale.
• Gradual annual increase in the share of companies from Poly partnership portfolio that hire interns after graduation leading to 50%.