Education–labour alignment key to sustainable economic participation

When discussing employability, the conversation often gravitates towards labour-market statistics or narratives of limited opportunity. Traditionally, employability is treated as an isolated outcome, often measured through short-term indicators and immediate figures. Yet, labour policy cannot be successful in a vacuum. A nation’s policy framework is its organism: labour outcomes are inseparable from the societal and educational structures that sustain them. Without a well-aligned education environment, labour policy alone cannot deliver sustainable economic participation.
This is most evident in the persistent discussion surrounding “skill gaps”, which in many countries has become a vague scapegoat rationale. The most prevalent deficits cited in global and local studies remain English language proficiency and computational literacy. These gaps are neither newly identified nor speculatively understood. Rather, they reflect competencies that require long-term, cumulative development rather than rapid intervention. Educational systems are designed to build such “embodied capital” progressively across a pupil’s lifespan, rather than through short-term remedial correction.
However, education reform does not yield immediate returns. The students benefitting from these revised curricula must first progress through the system wherein they are supported by trained educators and updated assessments, before the impacts are felt in the workforce. In this sense, the temporal lag of education policy must not be subject to immediate assessment, as it is a structural necessity; its greatest returns are realised only when a new generation of graduates from a reformed curriculum enters the economy.
Yet, even the most robust policy frameworks have their limits. Because a child spends only a fraction of their time within schools, society ought not to fully “outsource” the responsibility of education to the state.
Drawing on the work of the famous French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, we must recognise that it is cultural capital, the linguistic codes, cognitive habits and dispositions cultivated within the family, that primarily drives the success of both educational and labour policies. While governance provides the institutional scaffolding, it is the home environment that provides the readiness to climb it. Ultimately, the success of a nation’s workforce is a symbiotic process between governments and societies.

AZIZA AL MUGHAIRY

The writer is a Muscat-based independent researcher