Saudi Labor Minister Adel M. Fakieh Tuesday said the Kingdom while focussing on job demand, job supply and market clearance, needs to create three million job opportunities by 2015, and six million by 2030 as he addressed the issue of unemployment in the country at the Sixth Global Competitiveness Forum (GCF) currently underway in Riyadh. The Ministry is developing a Labor Market Observatory which will be a comprehensive database of 66 key labor market indicators,” he said. “The “dashboard” initiative will help the government to track and understand labor market statistics, performance, and outcomes. It will be a key tool for fact-based decision-making by both researchers and policy-makers.” He said the employment generation continues to be Saudi Arabia's main challenge and the government has been taking initiatives to tackle the three focus areas during the past 12 months. “Many of them have already been launched while others are either in the pipeline or conceptual stage,” the Minister said. “ He said the job-demand initiatives need to be prioritized to immediately substitute some of the 8 million expatriate jobs. “This will be followed by long term plan with stronger efforts to deliver better vocational training.” To improve market clearance mechanisms, the Ministry is developing a “mutually reinforcing system” consisting of career counseling, training and capability building coupled with match-making between employers and job seekers, Fakieh said. “The Ministry will also provide new financial and other incentives for both employers and the unemployed,” the Minister said. Fakieh shared a snapshot of the Ministry's initiatives. The Hafiz program provides job search support, job-matching, and basic training to more than a million young job seekers. It also provides unemployment benefits of SR 2,000 per month (for a maximum of one full year) for nearly 75000 Saudis while they are seeking jobs. “Our vision for Hafiz going forward is to host integrated services for job seekers: job counseling, training and match-making with employers would each complement each other,” he said. The other initiatives cited by the Minister included Istiqdam, which gives employers access to flexible or project-based labor, public-private partnerships, SME business reforms, job placement centers, internet-based virtual labor market and online training in e-learning modules. He said the Saudi labor inspection system must assure compliance with regulations and reinforce transparency. “The Ministry is working in collaboration with the ILO to ensure that our labor inspections are in-line with international labor standards,” he said. Fakieh elaborated on the Ministry's work force Saudization initiative known as Nitaqat, a classification and ranking system of private sector employment of Saudi nationals, by market sector and company size. “Nitaqat was introduced several months ago and has been very widely discussed in the public. This initiative uses a more fact-based and differentiated approach to set quotas for employing Saudi nationals,” he said referring to the color coding and grading system. “The new Nitaqat system only compares companies to their peers of the same size and the same economic activity and based on actual rates achieved. The excuse that ‘my business is different' is therefore no longer valid,” the Minister said. Fakieh cited three ways of making the Saudi labor market more responsive and intelligent: improve the quality of Saudi employment, enabling Saudi nationals to develop and grow into leadership positions, improve the quality of expatriate employment, and covert Nitaqat into a more targeted system, similar to Canada's and Australia's. The Minister stressed the need for a coherent strategic framework to integrate all programs and projects at organizational, policy, and operational levels. In terms of operations, “our aspiration is to transform the Human Resources Development Fund into the Kingdom's Labor Agency, providing a one-stop-shop for all job seeker needs,” he said. “Policies need to be aligned to provide coherent incentives and remain adaptive, responsive to feedback, dynamic, and fact-based. Operations require new processes that break through the silos of individual government entities,” he said. “We will need to build a new culture of service to our ‘clients'—the employers, the job-seekers, the guest workers and the society at large,” the Minister concluded. SAGIA honored the winners of the Saudi Fast Growth 100 Initiative. The manager of SFG100 initiative, Mrs. Haifa AlShareef, said there was a significant increase in the number of companies applying for the initiative for GCF2012. “Some 80% of winning companies were able to develop and expand their businesses.” “There are many privileges that are granted to winning companies, like giving them access to foreign investment opportunities in Saudi Arabia, in addition to highlighting their activities in the media and providing them with training opportunities”, she said.
