The ASEAN-BAC indicates that, in certain unspecified locations, a significant proportion of employers judge young graduates as unprepared for employment; this does not allow this assessment to be attributed to Thailand and Indonesia. The region has developed university access, while the evolution of teaching content varies according to training systems. Training systems evolve at variable rates depending on the countries and employment sectors.

The Essential Points

  • In Thailand and Indonesia, 75% of employers judge their graduates unprepared for employment, according to ASEAN-BAC (2025).
  • Malaysia records 40% of its population without basic digital skills, even as it positions itself as a regional technology hub.
  • The regional deficit will reach 9 million ICT professionals by 2030 if training systems do not change course (ASEAN-BAC 2025).
  • Talent mobility functions as an aspirating pump: Singapore, Australia, and Japan capture trained profiles before they build a local ecosystem.
  • The window for building a regional skills chain is closing: if adjustments do not occur before 2030, dependence on expatriation would become difficult to correct.

The Degree as a Misleading Signal

South-East Asia has accomplished something impressive on paper. In two decades, the enrollment rate in higher education has surged in most ASEAN economies. Indonesia trains millions of graduates each year. Thailand has multiplied its provincial universities. Malaysia aspires to become a regional center of excellence.

The enrollment figures are good.

The problem comes after the degrees are awarded.

ASEAN-BAC states that, in certain unspecified places, a significant proportion of employers believe young graduates are not ready for employment. The training system can produce certifications without guaranteeing the acquisition of corresponding capacities. Universities have developed in volume, while curricula evolve at variable rates.

This gap has a precise mechanism. The region’s higher education programs were built for an industrial and administrative labor market. They train engineers capable of meeting standardized specifications, accountants mastering local standards, managers trained in traditional hierarchical organizations. But the digital economy demands something else: the ability to work in project mode, to reason with data, to iterate rapidly. These skills are rarely learned in a lecture hall.

The WEF, in its Future of Jobs 2025 report, documents at the global level gaps between the evolution of certain professions and the preparation of existing training programs. In South-East Asia, the modalities of university governance, industry-university partnerships, and applied research funding vary from country to country.

40% of Malaysians Without Basic Digital Skills: A Strategic Paradox

Malaysia illustrates the contradiction in its own way. The country is among the most advanced in the region in terms of digital infrastructure, attractiveness for data center investments, and stated technological ambition. Kuala Lumpur readily presents itself as a credible alternative to Singapore for technology companies seeking a foothold in South-East Asia.

Basic digital skills vary within the Malaysian population. This data deserves to be read carefully: it does not speak of data science or software development. It speaks of elementary skills—using professional email, manipulating a spreadsheet, navigating collaborative tools. Skills that are today the floor, not the ceiling, of digital employability.

This figure signals an internal fracture that national technological ambition tends to mask. Malaysia presents a digital economy and digital capacities unevenly distributed, with urban concentration and gaps between large enterprises, SMEs, and territories; this does not demonstrate that a large portion of the population is excluded from basic digital economy participation. This duality can contribute to difficulties in recruiting skilled labor and underutilization of human potential.

Gaps between digital infrastructure and training exist in several countries in the region. ASEAN countries have invested in the physical infrastructure of the digital, notably cables, data centers, and mobile coverage, while developing training policies. The development of infrastructure and that of training do not necessarily progress at the same pace. It is an inversion that proves costly when demand for skills accelerates.

The Flight to Singapore as a Revealer of Regional Imbalance

Singapore is often presented as the model to follow for ASEAN. It is also, structurally, an aspirating pump for the talents of its neighbors. The city-state has built an educational and professional ecosystem that attracts qualified profiles trained in Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, or Thailand. Australia and Japan play a similar role, each in their own sectors.

This movement is not illegitimate in itself. Talent mobility is a normal feature of the global economy. Mobility can create risks of brain drain, but it can also generate financial and skills transfers for the benefit of countries of origin. An Indonesian engineer trained in Jakarta who leaves to work in Singapore five years after graduation has not had time to contribute to building a local technological fabric. He takes with him training whose cost was borne by Indonesian society and whose benefits accumulate elsewhere.

This mechanism creates a two-way dependence. Economies whose talents leave for Singapore or Sydney may encounter difficulties in meeting their rare skills needs. Singapore combines international recruitment and substantial investments in training and retraining local talents. Regional cooperation on skills and talent mobility remains unequal. This is exactly what the case of the manufacturing industry in South-East Asia also documents: the region assembles without designing, and training programs reproduce this pattern by training without anchoring.

Existing Regional Initiatives and Their Limits

Faced with these findings, several countries have undertaken concrete reforms. They must be named, because they exist and deserve better than polite silence.

Indonesia launched the Prakerja program, an online vocational training fund that has reached several million beneficiaries since 2020. The platform covers digital, craft, and business skills, in partnership with private operators like Tokopedia or Ruangguru. It is a serious initiative, at the scale of a population of 280 million inhabitants, but whose impact studies on actual employability remain mixed.

Malaysia launched MyDigital, its digital transformation roadmap, which includes skills development objectives. The Malaysia Digital Economy Blueprint aims to train hundreds of thousands of workers in digital trades by 2025. These targets are ambitious; their actual achievement remains to be verified.

Thailand, through its Ministry of Education, has integrated digital skills modules into certain university curricula, with occasional partnerships with Google, AWS, and Microsoft for certifications recognized by industry.

Reforms to training systems are unequal and sometimes insufficient, but changes in curricula, partnerships, and continuing education are documented. These initiatives can complement these reforms. They remain insufficiently coordinated at the regional level, while the challenge is itself regional. The retraining needs generated by automation require a systemic response, not one-off programs. It is the same problem observed in Europe or North America, but with narrower margins for public maneuver and tighter calendar urgency.

Financing is the other constraining variable. Public spending on education remains below OECD benchmarks in most ASEAN states. Public-private partnership is often invoked as a solution, but it runs up against an imbalance of incentives: companies train profiles whose value they are not assured of capturing, in labor markets where mobility remains strong. Investing in training an employee who will leave for Singapore in two years is financing a competitor’s competitiveness.

2030: The Window is Closing Faster Than Anticipated

ASEAN-BAC mentions a need for additional ICT professionals by 2030; it is preferable to speak of projected need rather than deficit, and to signal the ambiguity of the scope. The available projection was formulated in 2025 for the 2030 horizon, that is, a horizon of approximately five years; as of August 19, 2026, approximately four years and four months remain before 2030. And it occurs precisely when demand for digital skills is accelerating due to AI, industrial automation, and digitization of public services. ASEAN would then be in the situation of an economy seeking to accelerate without the necessary drivers.

The open window poses a concrete challenge: building a coherent regional skills chain before the shortage becomes structural. Two trajectories are emerging, without either being inevitable.

In the first, ASEAN countries continue on their current trajectory. Educational policies are largely the responsibility of states, while inscribed in regional cooperation frameworks whose implementation remains voluntary and unequal. Talent mobility continues to drain trained profiles toward high-wage economies. The projected need is confirmed, at least partially. Technology companies established in the region can resort to external service providers for certain rare skills.

ASEAN comprises economies with diverse capacities in digital design, while dependence on expatriation varies by country and sector.

In the second trajectory, a genuine regional coordination dynamic is triggered. ASEAN-BAC and member governments agree on minimum standards for mutual recognition of digital certifications. Joint training corridors develop between countries, Malaysia training advanced skills that Indonesia has not yet developed, for example, with financial mechanisms that compensate for outflows. Programs like Prakerja improve in quality through rigorous impact evaluations and sustainable funding. Industry-university partnerships, today scattered, become contractual, with employment commitments in exchange for co-investments in curricula.

Singapore, rather than remaining a destination for regional talents, plays a hub role for reexporting them to its neighbors, which it is beginning to do occasionally through certain SkillsFuture programs.

This second trajectory requires certain conditions that are not currently met. It first assumes a significantly increased public investment, whose deficit the ADB has documented in its report on digital transformation in Asia. It then assumes genuine political coordination, in a regional organization, ASEAN, structurally committed to the principle of non-interference in national affairs, which makes convergence of educational policies particularly difficult. It finally assumes that companies accept internalizing part of the training cost, in exchange for visibility on employment trajectories.

The signals to monitor in the next two to three years are identifiable. The budget allocated to education in the next cycles of Indonesian and Thai national planning will indicate whether states move from discourse to budgetary decisions. The progression of comparable digital certifications from one country to another will indicate whether mutual recognition progresses. And the proportion of graduates who remain to work in their country of origin, a difficult but crucial indicator to measure, will indicate whether educational reforms are sufficient to make local markets more attractive than expatriation.

What a Regional Hub Really Supposes

The notion of a “talent hub” has become the standard vocabulary of all national strategies in the region. Each capital aspires to be one. But a hub supposes a network, and a network supposes that the nodes exchange with each other rather than drain toward a single point.

In its 2025 report, ASEAN-BAC examines talent mobility from the angle of a resource to be oriented rather than a problem to be contained. It sketches mechanisms of circulation rather than permanent emigration, incentives for return, and agreements on social rights portability. Implementation of these avenues supposes a political will that the next five years will allow to test.

What is at stake goes beyond the educational question alone. A region that does not train its local digital skills will remain dependent, not only for its talents, but for its software, its data architectures, its technological standards. The same pattern of dependence is observed in factories that automate without training the operators capable of maintaining their own machines. Training to keep is also training to design. And designing is the condition for weighing in the digital economy to come, not merely executing it.

ASEAN states will decide whether to treat training as current spending or as structuring investment, and this choice will condition the region’s trajectory.

Sources

  1. ASEAN-BAC (2025), From Talent Gaps to Talent Hubs: Rethinking Mobility in ASEAN’s Digital Economy: https://asean-bac.org/news-and-press-releases/from-talent-gaps-to-talent-hubs-rethinking-mobility-in-asean-s-digital-economy
  2. World Economic Forum, Future of Jobs Report 2025 (weforum.org)
  3. Asian Development Bank, Digital Transformation in Asia: Bridging the Skills Gap (report 2026, adb.org)
  4. Borgen Project, analyses on educational inequalities in South-East Asia (borgenproject.org)