Vocational education must equip workers with relevant skills: Minister - ANTARA News

TEXT START: Jakarta (ANTARA) - Manpower Minister Yassierli said vocational education must equip students with skills and character that enable them to adapt to rapid changes in the labor market.

The Dissection

The article is dressing labor-market triage as educational reform. It accepts AI, industrial automation, and digitalization as permanent forces, then tells workers to keep updating themselves so they can remain selectable by employers. The proposed answer—competencies, portfolios, data awareness, creativity, innovation—is a program for competing over the shrinking residue of human work.

The text contains a partial truth: vocational institutions that teach obsolete skills will produce unemployable graduates. But it treats better adaptation as if it preserves the underlying employment system. It does not.

The Core Fallacy

The central error is confusing employability with economic viability. Under the Discontinuity Thesis, AI does not merely create a demand for new skills; it progressively removes the need for mass human labor across cognitive and coordination-heavy occupations. Training workers to be more adaptable cannot guarantee that employers will need more workers.

Skills-based hiring changes the selection filter, not the ownership structure. Portfolios and practical competencies may help a minority enter surviving niches, but they also make labor more transparent, comparable, and replaceable. The system gets a better-ranked queue for fewer positions.

Hidden Assumptions

• That the green and digital economies will create enough human jobs to offset automation.
• That education systems can update faster than AI capabilities and employer requirements change.
• That the problem is primarily a skills mismatch rather than collapsing demand for human labor.
• That creativity, innovation, and social awareness remain durable human moats rather than capabilities augmented or partially automated by AI.
• That gaining relevant skills produces bargaining power, stable wages, and meaningful productive participation.
• That employers will continue absorbing large graduating cohorts instead of using automation to reduce headcount.
• That diplomas becoming less important represents liberation, rather than a shift toward continuous performance testing and intensified labor competition.

Social Function

This is transition management wrapped in meritocratic language, with a layer of ideological anesthetic. It prepares institutions to explain unemployment as an individual failure to adapt, while avoiding the decisive question: who owns and controls the automated productive system?

Its most useful function is administrative. It can channel some workers into temporary servitor roles—maintenance, deployment, verification, compliance, and physical operations around AI capital. It cannot restore the mass employment-to-wage-to-consumption circuit.

The Verdict

The minister is prescribing better camouflage for a dying labor market. Vocational education may improve survival odds in narrow, lag-protected niches, but under P1–P3 it cannot preserve mass productive participation. It trains workers to compete for the scraps automation has not yet claimed; it does not give them ownership of the machinery claiming them.