Quality of secretarial courses execrable

JAKARTA (JP): Secretarial courses are mushrooming around the city, but the quality of their graduates is often execrable, the head of the Indonesian Association of Secretaries (ISI) says.

Many graduates claim to have graduated from good courses and institutes, "but some cannot even type addresses onto envelopes," Dewi Margono complained yesterday.

Dewi, a secretary at a property company, PT Pancanusa, said that in her experience, graduates of secretarial courses applying to be receptionists can't even handle telephone calls properly.

"I don't understand why this should be so," she said during a break at a one-day seminar on secretarial communication skills.

"There are many new secretarial courses but we're worried about their quality."

The Association, she said, is planning to survey the quality of a number of secretarial institutes as a member of the board in charge of examining the curricula of vocational schools. The board is under the Ministry of Education and Culture.

However Dewi also said that the attitude of the graduates themselves is probably the problem.

She said new graduates lack polish in their daily relationship with clients.

Dewi, who started her career in the late 1970s, also said secretaries used to express a stronger will to learn.

"In my day there were not as many secretarial courses as there are now, but young secretaries were more willing to learn and adjust," she said with a sigh.

Employers and clients of several companies, Dewi said, often complain of secretaries' lack of social skills.

On a material basis the appreciation of secretaries has grown, she said, with an average of Rp 700,000 (US$320) a month for newcomers in large companies .

The seminar was organized by the Jakarta-based Metropolitan Secretary Club in cooperation with Sisindosat, a subsidiary of PT Indosat. The event was held in conjunction with World Secretary Day which fell on April 24 this year. (anr)