The Mayoralty Academy was opened by Adel Faqih, Jeddah Mayor, at King Abdul Aziz Cultural Center in Abrug Al-Raghama on Saturday. The academy started providing training programs to mayoralty employees five months ago on a trial basis. According to Dr. Sameer Hussain, head of Human Resources in the mayoralty, there are currently 3,000 employees in the mayoralty, but a further 1,000 employees are required because the area of geographical coverage of the mayoralty is being extended. He said that only 12 percent ofthe mayoralty's employees are university graduates. Also, there is a need for more employees with specialist qualifications. He said that although engineering, for example, is among the most important fields for the mayoralty, less than five percent of the employees are engineers. At least 20 percent of the mayoralty's employees should be qualified in engineering. Moreover, Hussain said that the average employee has only two-and-a-half years' experience, which means that overall the employees of the organization lack experience. As a result of these shortcomings, the idea of founding an academy arose to improve the mayoralty's services. “The concept of the academy came from the mayoralty's strategy which was developed four years ago,” Hussain said. “One of the main parts of the HR strategy was to have a training center to upgrade qualifications of the mayoralty staff,” he added. Hussain said that the concept of the academy is to provide different development and training tools for the employees of the organization. He added that the most important element in the five-year long strategy is to provide classroom-based training programs. “As a beginning, we are providing at least a four-day training program for every employee of the mayoralty,” said Hussain. “This particular phase would be hard to achieve if we did not have an in-house training center. That is why we focused on establishing a training center at King Abdul Aziz Cultural Center,” he added. Answering a question about whether the opening of the academy had come rather late in the day, he said, “No, it is not late, because during the last four years we have been developing all the necessary HR infrastructure. Basically, we were developing the competency values and the competency framework upon which to base the training programs. So we created the training programs based on the functional and management framework. We now have a set of training programs tailored for the needs of the municipality that will help develop employees' skills according to our standards and strategy,” he explained.
