Examining the Relevance of Indonesian Vocational High School Career Outcomes to the Labor Market

When coping with tight competition in the Asian Economic Community, career guidance from educators can be very beneficial to students. This research looks at vocational high schools in Pasuruan, East Java, Indonesia and aims to: see the attainments of vocational school graduates in labor markets, analyze the guidance-counseling program to bridge students’ student’s outcome and labor market, and the partnership systems for connecting with their stakeholders as users of labor. This research employed mixed qualitative and quantitative methods with an explorative survey. The findings reveal that graduates achieve successful attainment in the labor market in three areas: a variety of jobs, satisfied standard competence in the job market, and satisfied income. However, in preparing production markets, most schools lack: loyal customer bases for production outputs, marketing networks, and showrooms; adequate promotional efforts for their production outputs; personnel for quality assurance activities, resulting in graduates being unprepared for employment; and adequate industry support for production, such as by outsourcing production to schools’ production units. Half of the schools have employed liaison officers to seek orders from industrial partners or companies for joint production, and such staff has been key in empowering school committees to enlarge their partnership networks.