March 2017-Newsletter address
Welcome to the first edition of our Sustainable Skills newsletter!
The new brand has officially appeared for the first time during the Indonesia-Australia Business Week 2017 (IABW), held between 6 and 10 March in Jakarta. The event, led by the Hon Steven Ciobo MP, Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment, has been attended by a delegation of 130 senior Australian business representatives. The business mission comprised 57 events focused on five main sectors:
- Agrifood supply chain
- Financial services and technologies
- Resilient cities
- Tourism: destination development and promotion
- Vocational Education and Training (VET).
It’s been extremely exciting to present for the fist time Sustainable Skills in such an inspiring context, and the feedback about the role that our organisation can play to support the development of an effective TVET system in Indonesia was absolutely positive.
During the IABW, I had the opportunity to learn what are the key priorities for vocational education in Indonesia. The massive infrastructure needs that the country is currently experiencing represents one of the greatest challenges for the national TVET system, that needs to develop in the short term the capacity to form highly-skilled local workforces for the civil construction sector.
The mission has been an excellent networking opportunity and presented me with the chance to discuss Indonesia-Australia cooperation on vocational education in a meeting with Dr. Rudy Salahuddin, Indonesia Deputy Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs, Mr Jonathan O’Dea, Parliamentary Secretary for the Premier and the Treasurer, NSW Government, Mercy Simorangkir, Director, NSW Trade and Investment and Austrade and the KPPIP team, the Committee for Acceleration of Priority Infrastructure Delivery.
Over the past months, the SkillsDMC/Sustainable Skills team has done an amazing job seeking new business opportunities, and we are now starting to see the first results as Ben Rawlings, Sustainable Skills Director International Development Services, travelled to Uganda to negotiate our participation to a Skills Development Project managed by the Private Sector Foundation Uganda. The final outcome is still uncertain, but we are proud to say that our technical proposal has obtained an excellent evaluation from the committee, positioning Sustainable Skills between the leading consultancy organisations in the TVET sector worldwide.
