Employers in the Middle East are currently facing a widening skills crisis as they struggle to recruit trained, role-specific talent. According to recent reports, more than 27 per cent of the Middle East’s youth is unemployed, and the region needs to create more than 100 million new jobs by 2020.
Broadly, the skills challenge falls into three categories: retaining talent, meeting immediate workforce needs and meeting future needs.
Retaining talent
Employers must explore better ways of retaining talent than just ‘paying higher salaries’. Raising salaries and compensation packages is neither sustainable nor healthy for the job market.
Workforce development must be tackled as a strategic issue to address the current and future demands of the regional talent shortage.
Meeting immediate needs
It seems that the easiest way to meet immediate workforce requirements is to just ‘recruit more expatriates’. While this approach meets short-term demand, it does not address the long term need for continued talent acquisition, retention and development of GCC nationals.
Expatriate subject matter experts, while critical to the economy, must support local talent development. Employers can consider including knowledge transfer to local management as a key component in employment contracts when hiring such specialists.
Meeting future needs
The importance of meeting future talent needs must be explored as a structural issue that needs to be addressed at every level of the education system. As a starting point, we must be clear about the type of skills and talent businesses will require in both the short- and long-term future.
The education system must then support this requirement at all levels — from schools, colleges and universities to on-the-job training and R&D.
Developing business expertise and the best and the brightest minds of the UAE and GCC organisations needs a fresh, radically different approach to tackle nationalisation effectively.
Corporations and governments must focus on three key areas of development:
Core skills development:
Businesses could partner with global suppliers to ‘localise’ job training, providing each employee with the right set of skills based on the particular career level he or she is at. Basic tools and skills such as time and meeting management and presentations skills help improve work effectiveness.
Such courses should be built into undergraduate programmes so candidates can learn and embed them at an early stage.
Leadership development
Bringing in world-class partners to support the development of today’s and tomorrow’s leaders is only one part of the solution. What we must now examine is how these experts will facilitate learning for the region’s professionals.
One fundamental way we address this is by avoiding the cold Request for Proposal (RFP) process. RFPs were introduced to invite standardised product offering from suppliers in the manufacturing sector — they are not as effective for talent development which needs much more bespoke, customised solutions.
In order to get the greatest benefits out of external training partners, businesses must allow them to demonstrate just how they will deliver an impactful innovative learning solution that is aligned to the region and the particular organisation’s workforce requirements.
Female talent development
Developing female talent should become a higher priority for regional organisations, especially as GCC women in business continue to prove themselves to be more than a match for men.
Quotas are an effective starting point but training and development must start from a young age so employers can easily bring young articulate graduates on board.
Our region is currently facing a serious skills crisis which can quickly aggravate if not managed effectively. Just relying government legislation or foreign expatriates will not solve the problem — educators, employers and employees must all play their respective roles in building a talent development system that effectively addresses the specific workforce requirements of the Middle East.
The writer is an executive education expert at London Business School.
