Preemployment Cards and Opportunity for Edutech Startups to Validate Business

It is officially stated on the Employee Ministry's site that the Preemployment Card is the government's program for working competence development aimed at job seekers, layoff sufferers, or employees in need of skill improvements. Every cardholder will receive funds accordingly. It will be available to access any workshop/coaching through certain partners.

The notion is, as quoted from the official site, thee government partners with loads of digital startups as a place to "exchange" incentives through the Preemployment Card with various forms of coaching.

As the latest news arrived, the government is said to increase the budget for the Preemployment Card Program from Rp10 trillion to Rp20 trillion. The value added to each participant also increased to Rp3,550,000, including Rp1,000,000 available to disburse for the coaching session, Rp600,000 per month for 4 months as completing the coaching session, and Rp150,000 as employment survey incentives.

"The Preemployment Card is to train them for workplace. However, they have to complete some trainings. It's not like unemployment benefit, but prepare them for job market," Minister of Research & Technology / BRIN, Bambang Brodjonegoro said.

The participation of many digital platforms in the Preemployment Card development is quite freshening. First, the trust starts to grow, from the government to the citizens, and the transactions from participants can encourage business growth, improve the quality, and show off to the public.

An opportunity for edtech startups to validate business

MauBelajarApa and SkillAcademy, with Tokopedia, Bukalapak, Pintaria, SekolahMu, and Pijar Mahirm are some of the government's selected platforms for the Preemployment Card program.

MauBelajarApa's Founder, Jourdan Kamal told DailySocial, the Presidential Staff Office has contacted their team in the mid of last year. The government is said to be looking for a platform that provides training,  MauBelajarApa comes up because of their concept matches the needs of the government.

MauBelajarApa is an e-commerce-like online platform, especially for training for both online and offline.

Simply put, the agreement was made, the government and MauBelajarApa decided to collaborate and make MauBelajarApa one of the platforms where the beneficiary cards received their training.

"Furthermore, [the mechanism] is more for us to do business as usual. The only difference is the classes for Preemployment Card must be approved and curated by the government. Once it has been approved, the beneficiary cardholders will be directed to our landing page maubelajarapa.com/karturprakerja to join the approved classes," Kamal said.

Currently, MauBelajarApa provides approximately 1000 classes each month, both offline and online, with a total of 20,000 users.

Meanwhile Ruangguru, a rising education technology startup, is also involved in providing training for the beneficiaries of the Preemployment Card through one of their services, Skill Academy. Slightly different from MauBelajarApa, Skill Academy offers a wide variety of choices online.

"The appointment and announcement of the Skill Academy as an official partner of the Preemployment Card program is a great honor for us. It has been our mission in Ruangguru to be able to facilitate access to lifelong education. Skill Academy is launched as a business unit in Ruangguru that focuses on helping professionals and potential employees to improve their skills in order to get relevant to the needs of today's industry," Ruangguru's Co-Founder, Iman Usman said.

This is the right time for startups in the education sector to prove that they are ready to be the leading platform to improve the skills of the Indonesian people.

Other educational startups, for example those specifically focused on languages ​​such as Cakap and Bahaso, Hacktiv8 for technological solutions, and others can also take this opportunity.

With the number of beneficiaries reaching 5.6 million people, this could be the right time to contribute to the country while proving that edtech in Indonesia is qualified enough to be a learning choice.

–Original article is in Indonesian, translated by Kristin Siagian