Leaving a Giant Tech Company to Make a Real Impact on Indonesia’s Education Sector
After two years abroad, taking a master’s degree in development studies, Yuandra Ismiraldi returned to his home country, Indonesia, joining an e-commerce company that later became one of Indonesia’s unicorns. Devoting over three good years to the company, Andra later took up other opportunities — this time at Google.
One may have guessed he’d settle down with the giant tech company. Yet Andra, who has a strong interest in infrastructure scalability and optimization engineering, found what he has longed for quite some time: making a real impact on the community. And that’s when he heard about GovTech Edu for the first time.
“About 1,5 years ago I had a chance to talk with Mas Ibam and that’s when I heard about GovTech Edu,” Andra began his story. Ibrahim Arief (known as Ibam) is GovTech Edu’s Chief Technology Officer. Back in their startup life, the two were great colleagues and continued to nurture their friendship.
“He (Ibam) then invited me to talk with other GovTech Edu’s talents just to get myself familiar with the organization. Hanging out with over 10 great talents there made me realize how wonderful the opportunity to work at GovTech Edu is,” he continued. Andra was referring to the unique domain and positioning that GovTech Edu has compared to other entities he knows.
“I learned that GovTech Edu is supported by professional talents with extensive experience in their respective fields. These amazing talents collaborate with the government to develop a digital-based solution to boost the education sector in our country– which is quite rare to see.”
Driven by a mission to contribute to his motherland, Andra then joined GovTech Edu. “My role at GovTech Edu allows me to work on the issues right away thus improvements hopefully can be delivered as quickly as possible. I’d say the contribution to our users is direct and real. It is, of course, a great once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
In his early days at GovTech Edu, Andra understandably had some challenges adjusting given the different nature of the private sector and GovTech Edu.
“GovTech Edu has a broad and complex domain. Honestly, it was pretty challenging for me at first. Thanks to the assistance and collaboration provided by my colleagues at GovTech Edu and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology, everything could be well handled.”
At GovTech Edu, Andra is responsible for supporting all tribes within the organization by developing and adopting tools and standards that would improve apps and data reliability and development. Furthermore, Andra has to manage Rapor Pendidikan to become a reliable and high-standard technology product that would help millions of users in the archipelago.
While his responsibility may sound tremendous, Andra’s grateful that several great teams are backing him up. These are the engineers who aren’t only capable and driven to enhance our nation’s education system through cutting-edge technology products.
“These engineers are divided into three groups: (1) platform group consisting of the core team who support cross-tribes at GovTech Edu such as CloudOps, Security, Core Web Experience, Core Apps, dan Core QA (2) data tooling group who develops data engineering-related tools, and (3) Rapor Pendidikan group who develops Rapor Pendidikan product for Indonesia’s Ministry of Education,Culture, Research and Technology,” Andra explained.
“To be a great engineer candidate at GovTech Edu, one must possess high engineering standards while also having a heart that would love to contribute and make an impact on Indonesia’s public sectors, especially education,” he shared a little tip.
After over 2 years running, GovTech Edu’s solid team and efforts have reaped their hard work. As of today, GovTech Edu has served more than 350 thousand schools, 2.7 million teachers, and 742 thousand students. GovTech Edu has also collaborated with over 2.7 thousand industry partners.
Seeing all these accomplishments, Andra humbly said it is only the beginning of a process. “GovTech Edu has launched technology products that teachers and schools in the country have adopted. It is only a matter of time to see the impact of these products,” he said.
And just like his other mission-driven colleagues at GovTech Edu, Andra won’t stop making impacts on the nations. He hopes GovTech Edu continues developing reliable, high-quality, and beneficial technology products for Indonesia’s education. “It is my hope that GovTech Edu would be a benchmark for collaborating with the government to bring out the greater good,” he told us.
