Abstract:

With 14,247 Vocational High Schools (VHSs) and 5,020,723 vocational school students, vocational education in Indonesia has become a mainstream choice of education. However, the VHS alumni do not necessarily have a significant advantage over general high school alumni in securing employment. With this in mind, the Ministry of National Education has launched a VHS Revitalisation Programme  which one of its targets are to  enable students to become entrepreneurs. This is in addition to the on-going Teaching Factory initiative in which selected VHSs is set up as a real-life factory for students to practice the skills they obtained from class. Ideally, these teaching factories would support VHS production and services unit in producing products and services needed by the community as well as other schools. With an estimated 171 million internet users from a population of 267 million people in 2019, e-commerce systems have a huge potential to be used as a platform for marketing VHS teaching factories’ products and services. This paper reports the results of a research to identify and evaluate the challenges faced by VHSs in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and its surrounding areas in the production of goods and services and in marketing their products online. The study was conducted in 3 Vocational High Schools in Kulon Progo, Yogyakarta, Indonesia and the findings were confirmed through a questionnaire which received 107 responses from all over Indonesia. Several recommendations for VHSs and the government are suggested at the end of the paper.