Industrial Gathering 2014

By Abdul Aziz Turhan Kariko / Comi

Comi

On February 28th 2014, I attended a seminar created by BINUS CAREER, the topic was really interesting, Medium of Media: Past, Present, Future. The goal of the seminar was to give an insight about the future of mass media in Indonesia. Since the ASEAN Free Trade Association in 2015 is drawing near, in the seminar we talked about how people from all over the world are going to visit Indonesia for business or journalism purposes. People from English-speaking Asian countries like Singapore and Malaysia will be investing a lot in Indonesia, providing a lot of job opportunities for Indonesians. Therefore, future Indonesian employees are required to have good English proficiency if they want to work at international or multi-national companies.

The first keynote speaker in the seminar, Desi Anwar, a legendary news anchor from Metro TV, talked about one of the biggest threats for Indonesian job seekers is that in the future, top positions in some companies (esp. mass media) will probably be filled with foreigners, since the majority of local Indonesians have very poor education; 70% of them are only graduates of elementary school, junior high and senior high school.

She also talked about several requirements for someone to be working in mass media, like how you need to be ready all the time to cover news, as well a commitment to work during weekends (when necessary). She also said that a journalist must have a great curiosity of knowledge/information, good looks, good English, good socializing skills, and persistence. She mentioned that creativity is highly appreciated for someone to be working in mass media. However, she also added that it is unfortunate that creativity is sometimes ‘killed’ at schools, where it usually celebrates uniformity, and at the same time killing individuality. I admit that this is one of the problems that we have as educators; how to encourage the culture of learning in uniformity, while at the same time, not neglecting individuality of the students. I myself agree with Mrs. Anwar, in that educators should provide more activities engaging in creativity for the students, such as creative writing, performing arts, etc.

IMG-20140228-WA002Meanwhile, the 2nd keynote speaker, Dr. Ishadi S.K, a renowned figure in mass media as well as chief Human Resource of Trans TV, talked about how important education is to provide better human resource in Indonesia. He also noted that Indonesians must be able to change their consumerist culture to be more productive instead. Another interesting point that Mr. Ishadi talked about is how nowadays there are more Asians working as CEOs at some of the world’s top companies, to be precise, there were 9 Indians working at the world’s top companies. Therefore, he hoped that Indonesians can also compete with the Indians in achieving success and possibly working as top CEOs in the world’s leading companies.

I conclude that the future of mass media in Indonesia is really bright, especially since now we have the new media (online news, online references, etc.) as another method of getting information. With the ASEAN Free Trade Association drawing close, English as a language plays an important role in this matter, whether to communicate with other journalists or to be presented to audience/readers. Other than that, mass media companies expect creativity, persistence and productivity from the employees. Although it is going to be a lot of work for the students and educators to reach this kind of standard, but I’m sure we can manage, so that we can have a better Indonesia. (Aziz Comi, March 2014)