GOOGLE TO TEACH NEW JOB SKILLS IN ARABIC
▶ ‘Maharat min Google’ has a focus on women and improving gender balance of tomorrow’s workforce
Google has launched a digital skills programme in Arabic to empower young people and prepare them for the workplace.
Maharat min Google is intended to support Arab women in particular to find jobs, improve their careers or start their own businesses.
Maharat, which is Arabic for skills, offers free courses, tools, and in-person digital skills training to students, educators, job seekers and businesses.
“Today, the opportunities that technology provides are bigger than ever and there is more that we would like to do to ensure these opportunities are available to everyone,” said Google chief executive Sundar Pichai in a video message at the launch event in Dubai.
“We want to make sure we are empowering all.”
There is a growing gap between what the digital economies of today needs and what the future will require, and what the job seekers can offer based on their skills, he said. To bridge that gap, Google is offering that training to people who are already part of the region’s workforce and those who want to join it.
The platform – g.co/Maharat – has 100 lessons across 26 core topics in digital marketing that include search engine marketing, social media, video, e-commerce, geo-targeting, and data analytics.
Participants will get certificates after each course, which takes about nine hours to complete. The training programme is accessible on any platform.
“This programme has unique features,” said Matt Brittin, Google’s president of business operations across Europe, Middle East and Africa.
“It is built on our experience of digital training around the world. It is built on Arabic, and based on what we see the needs of the region to be [in the future].”
Google, he said, launched training programmes in Europe in 2015 and set itself the ambition of training a million Europeans. At the time, it seemed a very ambitious target and the company did not know how it was going to meet it, he said.
“We were blown away by the demand and we have now trained 3 million Europeans and 2 million across Africa,” Mr Brittin said.
“But we never had, until now, Arabic language content and we have been working on this for a while. We haven’t set ourselves a big target [in the Mena region], partly because we want to get this thing moving and reach out to communities but I would hope to see a similar level of demand [to that seen in Europe].”
Women are contributing to innovations coming out of the Arab world and yet this region has among the lowest level of female economic participation globally, Mr Pichai observed in his message, saying: “We want to help change this.”
This low level of participation means that the Mena region has the biggest opportunity to have an effect, Tarek Abdalla, Google Mena head of marketing, said at the launch.
Women make up 50 per cent of the graduates in the region but only 25 per cent work and out of that, only 19 per cent participate in vocational or on-job training, which is far below the 44 per cent for women in other parts of the world, he said.
“There is a lot to be gained from this level of economic participation and inclusion. In fact, the Middle East has the most to gain out of anywhere in the world,” he said.
“Combined economies [of the region] can grow by almost 50 per cent by 2025 if we achieve gender parity in the workforce and that is the largest impact globally out of all the markets.”
The Maharat initiative works with educators, local partners and government bodies to improve digital skills of the current and future labour force and entrepreneurs.
Research shows that by 2020, one in five jobs in the Arab world will require skills that are not widely available in the workforce today.
In the GCC alone, up to 3 million jobs will be at risk by 2025 because of this skills gap.
More than half – 51 per cent of young Arabs – consider unemployment their biggest concern and only 38 per cent believe their education gives them the skills they need to enter the workforce.
Google has teamed up with Injaz Al Arab, a regional non-profit organisation, which will begin in-person training to 100,000 students in 14 countries across the region, focusing on youth in underprivileged and rural areas.
Google is also working with the Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Foundation, which will train 100,000 people in Saudi Arabia alone.
The collaborations with Injaz and the foundation will target 50 per cent female participation. The company is looking for further local partnerships across the region with governments, universities, private-sector businesses and non-profit organisations to expand the reach of the Maharat programme.
“We are proud to bring Maharat to the region and look forward to seeing more people grow their careers and shape the digital future of the Arab world,” Mr Pichai said.
The programme is built on what Google says will be the needs of many young jobseekers in the near future