Event highlights current and future labour market needs

MUSCAT: Sultan Qaboos University organised a presentation on the national project to harmonise the outputs of higher education with the needs of the labour market, in the presence of a number of ministers, under-secretaries, members of Majlis Ash’shura and State Council and a number of academics from the university. The event was held at Al Faham Hall at the University Cultural Centre on Thursday.

Speaking on the occasion, Prof Amer bin Ali al Rawas, SQU Deputy ViceChancellor for Academic Affairs and Community Service, said that the efforts of the university and the authorities concerned to achieve this vital project have led to important results that will have a significant positive impact on the development process in the Sultanate.

“The project resulted in the establishment of a system of specialised studies in the labour market and the issues of harmonise the outputs of higher education to market needs, this come through establishing a specialised database to assess the current and future needs of the Omani labour market in terms of expected numbers, skills and disciplines require,” he said.

Prof Amer added that economic model was developed to help assess the future needs of the Omani labour market according to various economic scenarios. This was made by a team of economists from the Policy Studies Centre at Victoria University, Australia and the College of Economics and Political Science at Sultan Qaboos University.

In addition, a guide has been developed to link jobs with the specialisations of both the public and private sectors, and to build an electronic system to harmonise the outputs of higher education with the needs of the labour market.

The implementation of the national project to harmonise the outputs of higher education with the needs of the labour market comes within the framework of the Sultan Qaboos University’s Strategic Plan (2009-2013) to harmonise its outputs with the needs of the Omani labour market. This plan was adopted by the Council of Education as a national project that includes the harmonisation of all outputs of higher educational institutions with the needs of the labour market in the Sultanate.

The national project was implemented by a specialised team from SQU in collaboration with other relevant governmental units. The team is keen to achieve the objectives of the project; and study the current and future needs of the Omani labour market, and establish a specialised database that links the labour market data with higher education output data.

The team seeks to build an economic model that helps to assess the future needs of jobs in the Sultanate according to different economic scenarios, and build an electronic system which allows to update the data of job and specialisation to obtain the compatibility results immediately.

It seeks to find quantitative results for the future needs of the Omani labour market of qualified human cadres according to different scenarios, and find indicators about the important skills needed by the labour market from employers’ point of view. Other objectives of the team are to find indicators about the graduates’ satisfaction about the programmes offered by higher education institutions in preparing them to join the labour market; build and qualify human cadres to carry out future studies and research in the field of compatibility studies and labour market.