Tuesday, March 19, 2024 | Ramadan 8, 1445 H
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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Is there an oversupply of unemployable graduates?

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SALEH AL SHAIBANY - saleh_shaibani@yahoo.com - The job market in Oman is flooded with graduates and employers are spoiled for choices when it comes to recruit degree holders but not all of them fit the requirement. Here in Oman, nobody has come up with a higher education map that matches the exact requirements of employers in terms of specializations. At least 8,000 graduates seek jobs a year but companies who are supposed to employ them never have a say with their education. Academics, perhaps because of hindsight, don’t look beyond the day of graduation.


In theory, when higher education institutions churn out thousands of graduates annually, the job market is spoiled for choice.


Not really. It poses a problem because employers have to sift through thousands of applications to get who they want. They blame universities for sticking on status quo from curriculums which do not follow innovations and the changing world.


OUTDATED CONVENTIONAL CURRICULUM


We still teach these youngsters conventional methods that were taught 50 years ago passed from one teacher to another over many generations.


Ancient text books that should have been thrown in the bin are still stocked in the libraries of our colleges and universities.


Either somebody is lacking ideas in our higher education system or it is down to pure negligence of a catastrophic scale. Both ways, we are letting down the future generation and severely restrict the choices of employers.


Are we teaching the syllabuses that have gone past their shelf date?


And perhaps, like Dunkin Donuts, we get these courses from affiliating universities cheap when they reach their expiry date.


Or even worse, our institutions can only afford to sign up affiliating universities which are obscured and whose names are languishing in the bottom pile of international recognition. Contemporary teaching must take precedent.


The word ‘contemporary’ should not only reign supreme in the curriculum but the way the colleges and universities appoint lecturers. Some teachers do not update their skills. They prefer to ‘play it’ safe by teaching what they know and don’t bother to acquaint themselves with industrial changes.


The best practice of the leading universities of the world is not just to rely on career teachers who were recruited straight from the day they graduated. We need to include a good mix of career teachers and vastly experienced people from the industry. The latter bring with them latest developments and pass on to their students.


UNIVERSITIES PROMOTING ONLY POPULAR COURSES


One other thing to note is that there is a severe imbalance on the taught courses and the diversity. Local institutions can have the international backup from leading affiliating universities of the world to offer a wide range of courses. Yet, they stick and promote just a few. One wonders why more than half of the graduating students have taken either business studies or Information Technology (IT).


The academic imbalance creates a huge surplus in these two disciplines. In other words, the job market is oversupplied by business and IT graduates, much more than the companies need.


This is where the private sector can have their say. After all, employers are the biggest stakeholders of any educational system. If we are to serve the ever evolving industries, we need to create a regularly updated database to satisfy the needs of the private sector. For instance, engineering courses are severely underrated and few educational institutions are willing to teach them. Teaching engineering costs more money because it involves the purchase of expensive equipment and the set up of costly laboratories for students to train on.


The database must be created on the national level that would collect the job requirements of the industries to help the scholarship department as well as parents who are funding their own children to know what courses are in demand for a period in question.


This way, the number of graduates needed in the market would match the rate of the industry growth and the GDP. Company officials say that perhaps we are concentrating too much on degree holders and sideline vocational training.


The statistics show that on average, employers need between 40 to 60 per cent of their recruits to have degrees. The rest of their requirements are youngsters with basic education that can be in-house trained.


In conclusion, there should be comprehensive measures to correct mismatch between skills and jobs to avoid oversupply of graduates.


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