Although the number of IT graduates in Oman is increasing, the job opportunities are limited as government entities and private companies are reluctant to hire ‘non-specialised’ IT graduates.
According to Hassan bin Fida al Lawati, Director-General of Digital Society Development Division at Information Technology Authority (ITA), the government body entrusted with the implementation of eOman Strategy, human resource development and capacity-building in Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) is one of the most important pillars in this strategy.
ITA, he says, tries to achieve this objective via training programmes under two categories: ICT Industry Development and eSociety Development. ITA has established Sas Centre for Virtual Reality and Sas Centre for Mobile Apps Development, both of which provide special training courses. In addition, it offers training to IT undergraduates and job-seekers in open source programming and applications development through the Free and Open Source Software Initiative (FOSS).
ITA has partnered with international IT companies to deliver certified training courses to job-seekers and IT professionals.
On the high rate of unemployed IT graduates, Al Lawati said: “Many IT graduates don’t work in their specialisation due to a number of factors among which is companies’ insistence on prior experience.”
Besides, companies “lack confidence” in the national IT job-seekers and prefer IT experts/specialists for undertaking major projects. On the cooperation between ITA and companies that hire IT trainees, Al Lawati said: “Before designing any training programme, we approach government and private entities to study their requirements to tailor our programme as per their needs.” Nawal bint Naseeb al Araimi, Head of Information and Planning Division at Public Authority for Manpower Register (PAMR), says the number of registered Omani job-seekers on its database as of May 23, 2017, was 3,644 from different education levels. These include 315 males and 3,329 females across governorates.
According to PAMR, majority of specialisations in IT field is the general IT (27 per cent), followed by networking (11.4 per cent). A majority of job-seekers are graduates from higher colleges of technology and colleges of applied sciences.
Stressing the importance of the IT specialisation, Hani bin Mansour al Hasani, Director of Employment Department, Ministry of Manpower, said: “Most companies require specific IT specialisations such as programming. Companies also seek networking specialists to work on major projects either for government or private organisations.”
Al Hasani believes the biggest challenge is the limited job opportunities in the field. In addition, most of the government entities outsource IT maintenance and implementation-related work to private companies rather than employing Omani programmers or developers.
Zamzam bint Khalfan al Tamtami, a software engineer in an international IT company and a graduate of the On-Job Attachment Training Programme, too feels the jobs in the IT field are limited.
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