I read in the news late last year that President Joko Widodo had inaugurated Indonesia’s construction workforce certification acceleration program. This milestone meant that workers who build public facilities – those we commonly see on the side of the road, wearing yellow hats, boots, jackets, and safety gear – are officially recognized for their level of competence, which is then regulated through a certificate program. The introduction of this program is an innovative and very strategic move to encourage the development of mega infrastructure, which is the current government’s priority, and also stimulate labor-intensive projects that absorb a lot of labor.

Unfortunately, in my day-to-day work, the situation is very different. A colleague who owns an event organizer company was shaking his head because he mistakenly hired an Event Production Manager who claimed to be experienced and set a high service value but was not even familiar with the types of stage lights.

A client complained that the talents who came in could offer very different service prices even with standard work targets for the same project brief. For him, working with a creative worker is like buying a probability that is not guaranteed in output quality. Still, according to him, this area remains grey and may never be treated like sectors regulated by ISO (International Standard Organization).

Another case I heard, this time from Australia, a while ago, Hollywood actor Chris Hemsworth intended to shoot one of his scenes in Indonesia. The movie team then sent raiders so that the Indonesian team could fulfill the shooting inquiries, including preparing a camera operator with the required qualifications. Instead of responding well, the Indonesian team needed help understanding the required qualifications. The team was overwhelmed in finding a suitable camera operator, given that the person must be experienced in working with a specific type of camera, have work experience with particular minimum requirements, and can work collaboratively in an international team. After a while, the Indonesian team finally found the profile they were looking for: a professional from the advertising world with no film industry experience. Meanwhile, the rest of the film crew was recruited from neighboring countries such as Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines.

Potential Versus Exploration

The two examples above are just a few illustrations of how dynamic – yet chaotic – the qualification system or competency standardization of creative workers in Indonesia (both those who produce goods and services), which can harm both service tenants and service providers themselves – even weakening global competitiveness.

In fact, the Central Bureau of Statistics (BPS) in 2015 recorded the number of workers in the creative economy sector at 15.96 million people, compared to the total number of workers in Indonesia, which reached 114.82 million. The number of creative workers continues to increase, with an average growth rate of 4.38% per year.

Although the creative sector is still dominated by the culinary, fashion, and craft sub-sectors (93.4% of total creative economic activity) and dominated by 54% of female workers, millennials are beginning to burst out in many creative areas and in fields that have not been explored much before. These include advertising, publishing and printing, TV and radio, film, video and photography, music, performing arts, architecture, design, interactive games, and computer services – as mentioned in the Indonesian Ministry of Trade’s creative economy development blueprint 2009-2025. The education sector is also responding to this trend by offering more options for students to study social and creative arts so that Indonesia can expect a lot from this demographic bonus in the creative field.

Thus, Indonesian creative workers have great potential to compete with talents from other countries. However, to thrive and be recognized in international competition, it is necessary to strategically improve industry governance and human resource development.

Revamping Upstream, Strengthening the National HR Qualifications Framework

One of the first steps to take is to improve the data. This action includes mapping and defining professions and job classifications, regulating workers’ qualifications, and developing career paths and certification systems accompanying their work experience. These processes are essential to correct the simplification of jobs or professions in the creative world that are increasingly developing according to market demands beyond the basic disciplines and regulations underpinning them.

Our big challenge is how creative workers such as special editors for animated films, lighting engineers, online game app makers, designers and programmers for video mapping art, illustrators for storyboards, nature photographers, and many other unique professions fit into a qualification framework to be matched, equalized and integrated between their educational background, work experience, and skills, for the recognition of work competencies following the structure of their work in their respective sectors.

More commonly known professions, such as fashion designers, hairdressers, makeup artists, and so on, might be more fortunate because established professional associations assist their training development and certification processes. However, occupations that do not yet have a professional solidarity platform, are highly transformative in line with technological developments, are cybernetically networked, or their knowledge is learned through generations in a socio-cultural context, for example, may lose the opportunity to climb the career ladder, position themselves in the middle of the professional ladder, and have difficulty increasing the value of their expertise, because no qualification framework regulates competence and quantification of the rewards they are entitled to receive.

Hence, the law of nature prevails in today’s creative world. Those who are senior and highly qualified often lose out to those who merely dare to charge cheap rates. Both parties are not based on concrete arguments supported by certification as a form of general recognition of their competence, so efficiency becomes the only consideration regardless of the quality produced. It is not uncommon for those who are already classified as specialists to ‘slash prices’ when pressed by need or have too weak bargaining power so that the standard market price of a professional at a certain rank is increasingly challenging to hold.

Building Baseline Data Through Crowd-Sourcing Platforms

Job search sites for formal positions in the business world are currently straightforward to find. But let’s imagine that Indonesia has a dashboard that contains complete data on the types of jobs, specifically in the creative field, complete with the profiles and status of the workers. Not just a database that makes it easy to find the talent needed, this system is equipped with specific algorithms to produce an average standard of reward after taking into account the variables of educational background, skills provision according to education, job consistency, job period, training received throughout the career, mastery of technology or work tools, list and proof of projects worked on, case studies, reviews or testimonials from service users, to the talent’s track record on social media. They all play a role in positioning themselves professionally in certain competency quadrants, and they become increasingly accurate as more public data becomes aggregated.

A system like this can help the Creative Economy Agency (Bekraf), for example, process the potential reflected in its data. Related parties can read the trends of what creative fields are most developed and supported by the most significant number of talents at this time, know the best experts in their fields, see the scale or technique of work that local talent can do, what are the marketing gaps and opportunities to convert their value, what are the network development options, the price range of products and services, to what resources should be prepared by the parties to support the growth of a sector to the global level. This approach is also expected to balance the work of Bekraf, which currently focuses more on the downstream to improve the copyright protection system for work but is less involved in standardizing the competence of creative actors, which also affects their economic empowerment.

In the future, such a platform can also be a marketplace that brings together sellers and buyers of services, idealistic creators with business people with good trading skills, and junior actors with senior professionals who are legendary in their fields—so that economic transactions, knowledge, skills, information, technology, and network expansion coincide.

I even envision service users conducting open tenders with transparent qualifications, terms and conditions, and budget ceilings. In this scheme, those who do not win the tender are still entitled to be rewarded for the intellectual capital, creativity, tools, time, and energy they have expended to support the service user’s initiative. On the other hand, such a scheme can protect the creator or service provider from monetary loss and recognition of their creative ideas.

On the other hand, creative service providers may be able to publicly announce idea auctions to attract investors or service users interested in buying their creative concepts or products. Financial service providers could even be included in this ecosystem to open up their access to capital and opportunities to bring ideas to life.

Alternatively, fellow creatives can find partners in this ‘pool’ and co-create better value-added creative products, concepts, or programs. This network can also be a channel for education to encourage students to practice work with the parties, of course, with the help of technology. This platform can form a highly marketable dream team of the best people in their fields to work on a significant initiative the public has long awaited.

Such a platform – if successfully realized – is expected to be an enabler or catalyst for a more diverse, more empowered, more stable, and officially recognized creative community and have a strategic impact on the industry and economic life, especially when considering Bekraf’s target to achieve a creative economic growth of 6.75%, with a labor absorption of 17 million people, and an export value of innovative products that are expected to reach US$21.5 billion by 2019. The deadline is close.