DHL clarifies

DHL clarifies

I refer to your article titled RI professionals not ready for
competition published in The Jakarta Post on Jan. 16, 2003.

While your reporter brings up a valid point, we need to be
aware that good quality Indonesian professionals do exist.
Indeed, there are many skilled, qualified and extremely competent
Indonesian professions working across a broad spectrum of
industries and they are just as capable as their foreign
counterparts.

At PT Birotika Semesta (DHL Indonesia), for example, we
recognize and support local talent and aggressively seek to fill
management positions with Indonesian professionals. Today, nearly
all of our middle and senior management positions are filled by
highly capable Indonesian professionals, many of whom have been
with us an average of five years. In comparison, expatriates form
less than 0.007 percent of our total workforce of 680 employees.

The quality of professionals is also a function of a company's
commitment to help its people develop to their fullest potential.
Again, at PT Birotika Semesta we ensure that we support our
professional managers in every possible way through comprehensive
and on-going development programs.

I believe all of this has contributed to the success we have
had in finding and retaining the high-caliber local talent which
is vital for a service oriented business such as ours.

We need to recognize that the issue of the quality of
professionals is not unique to Indonesia. This is an issue that
exists in many other emerging economies around the world,
including Southeast Asia. It would, therefore, be a grave
injustice to perpetuate the misperception that "Indonesian
professionals are not ready for competition".

ERNA MUKTI, Human Resources Manager, PT Birotika Semesta/DHL, Jakarta