According to the Indonesian Central Statistics Agency, as of August 2020, the total of the labor force in Indonesia amounts to as much as 138.22 million people. The proportion of the population who are 15 years of age and who have worked in the past week based on the highest education completed is as many as 113.23 million people. Within the same data set, the unemployment rate shows that the number of open unemployment is dominated by productive human resources from the high school category, consisting of 2.6 million from high school and 2.3 million from vocational high school out of a total of 9.7 million unemployed people.

Vocational high school as an institution aims to prepare its graduates so that they can be employed directly by industries. The expectation is for vocational schools to solve many of the labor problems in Indonesia. The workforce produced by vocational high school has practical abilities that are, at the lowest level, are immediately ready for work. This means that, in theory, a lot of vocational high school graduates are already needed and should be ready to be absorbed by Industry.

Efforts to reduce the mismatch between the quality of education output and the needs of the business world and industry must be resolved by bridging the two sectors. And the government is making an effort to “link-and-match” vocational high schools with companies or organizations.

In this regard, EKONID works as a bridge to between education and industry. As an organization that aims to develop the Indonesian-German business sector, EKONID develops a link and match program for the world of Indonesian vocational education. In collaboration with Deutscher Industrie- und Handelskammertag (DIHK), it offers organization, coordination, quality control and certification of the Dual Vocational Education Program that conforms to the German model and the Dual Vocational Education standards.

This program is integrated into the German Dual Vocational Education and Training (GDVET) curriculum, which consists of 60% practice and 40% theory. This program guarantees high quality education for the development of a globally qualified local resources with high competitiveness.