Breeding Story of Internnet Indonesia
In less than 8 months, this initiative has impacted 10K+ Indonesia students nationwide and overseas in terms of career knowledge.
Back in 2018, I had an everlasting question after spending months in Engineering school: “Would I imagine myself as an Engineer in 2022?”. Although I followed the classes pretty well, I did not find the full enjoyment in exploring it compared to the topics of Technopreneur and Business-related field.
Since that time, I spent most of my time thinking about field and discipline outside the classes. Self-exploration would not be sufficient, thus, I braved myself to be connected with fellow students and alumni of my university to learn more about what I could grasp outside the Engineering field. After encouraging myself to interview dozens of them, I reached one light-bulb moment: “Your college major is positioned as a viable option for your career endeavors. Yet, what matters the most are how you utilize the opportunity on college years to broaden your network, obtain adequate soft skills, and gain real life-case experiences”
I am not kidding. If you believe that “In God we trust, others must bring data”, it would be my pleasure to bring it to the table.
Today, the world of work is evolving at a much faster pace than educational institutions can keep up with. In fact,
85% of jobs we will have in 2030 have not existed yet today (New York Federal Reserve Bank)
73% of undergraduates work in a job unrelated to their major now (Institute for the Future)
The highly uncertain job market forces students to find supplementary learnings and knowledge outside formal education to help them adapt to the ever-changing world of work. However, inequality in access to opportunity and knowledge among students of different backgrounds is an unsolved problem. Moreover, my internal research inferred that three underlying knowledge gaps experienced by the students:
- Fundamental knowledge gap, related to the benefit of doing internship and eligibility for a major-agnostic internship opportunity
- Recruitment knowledge gap, respectively for the availability of internships, channels, and its recruitment process
- Professional knowledge gap, that corresponds to the industry know-how and universally appreciated trait and skills at work
It led to the invention of Internnet Indonesia by my peers and me, a platform that focused on career knowledge and opportunities for students nationwide. To differentiate our service for a well-matured market regarding college students, we offered a 1-to-1 Mentorship Program that was supported by well-curated mentors from major-agnostic career paths (Consulting, FMCG, Tech-companies, and Banking). We also provide exclusive modules and learning materials to the respective career path.
To date, we have built strong traction with our targeted niche of Indonesian undergraduate students and fresh graduates. Obtaining 5.6K+ mentee applicants from 75+ universities through Indonesia and added by 15+ accepted mentees on well-sought internship positions for various companies in less than 3 months upon program completion.
Internnet has established a promising legacy of 150+ best-in-class mentors and 240+ curated community members and looking forward to expanding the impact even further in 2022. Since we believe that every student — any major — any university has equal rights for a career opportunity and knowledge.
Whether you are a student that currently feels you are positioned in my shoes back in 2018 (with a similar dilemma), a professional with a career background that is major-agnostic and passionate to share your experience, or anyone that keen to discuss youth career platform: feel free to reach me out for any inquiry, mentor application, or critics (abylafkin10@gmail.com or Aby Lafkin through LinkedIn).
