AMMAN — The
2022 National Employment Program, which is expected to provide 60,000 Jordanians job
opportunities in the private sector, is seen by some experts in the field of
labor market as “traditional and useless”.
اضافة اعلان
Experts interviewed
by Jordan News said that the government should come up with a plan
that helps harmonize the program with the requirements of the labor market.
Head of the
Workers’ House
Hamada Abu Nijmeh told Jordan News that “the program is expected to be an important
contributor, to enhance employment opportunities and to link job seekers with
job opportunities”.
“However, it is a
support program for employers more than it is a program to reduce unemployment,
as it will not contribute to a significant reduction in unemployment rates,” he
stressed.
“It may contribute
to lowering the growing unemployment rate, but will not be a solution to the
problem of unemployment in light of the large number of new entrants into the
labor market as job seekers, which is approximately 110,000 people annually,”
he added.
While admitting
that he did not know “the fate of similar programs announced by the government
in the past few years”, or whether they achieved their goals and succeeded in
reaching the announced numbers, he said that “it is important before repeating
this experience to run an evaluation of previous programs to ensure the extent
of their success and the seriousness of the concerned parties in the public and
private sectors in doing their roles”.
According to him,
over 400,000 people are unemployed, and, “accordingly, we need to create
approximately 250,000 new job opportunities, at least, to bring the
unemployment rate to what it was in 2014, when it reached 11.5 percent, which
is the lowest during the past 20 years”, and similar to the “current Arab
average of unemployment”.
To achieve this, he
said, “there is no alternative to attracting new investments and establishing
institutions, factories and projects that provide this number of job
opportunities”.
Abu Nijmeh emphasized
that “if we really want to reach a relatively acceptable level of unemployment,
we must create a labor market that employs at least 1.65 million citizens,
which is difficult to achieve without developing a national emergency plan in
which various official bodies and representatives of the private sector
participate, and without a real activation of the partnership with the
private sector”.
According to Abu
Nijmeh, it is also important to address the imbalances in university education
policies that take into account the requirements of the labor market and its
needs for competencies, and developing vocational training programs to keep
pace with recent developments in training policies and programs.
To ensure the
success of training and employment programs, Abu Nijmeh said that they must be
designed for
jobs and professions that are actually required in the labor
market, “to ensure that job opportunities are provided to them after completing
training, and are in accordance with the technical requirements of employers”.
Director of the
Phoenix Center for Economic and Informatics Studies Ahmad Awad told Jordan News that the program “may not be able to contribute to a tangible reduction in
unemployment rates in view of the very high unemployment rates, which reached
23 percent”.
He said that a
quick review of the employment programs implemented by successive governments
over the past years showed “that they did not succeed in reducing
unemployment rates. In fact, unemployment rates are constantly increasing, which indicates
their ineffectiveness”.
He added that few
graduates are qualified to enter the labor market due to the weakness of the
education and training system, wondering “why many of our students prefer
getting university education instead of vocational education, despite the fact
that in some modern countries most of the students prefer getting vocational
education”.
Awad claimed that
one of the main reasons for the significant rises in unemployment rates is the
government’s inability to establish mega-projects due to the difficult economic
conditions.
He stressed that in
order for the program to succeed this year, it must be expanded and linked to
the requirements of the labor market, and a real action plan should be drawn up
to that effect.
Despite numerous attempts to contact the minister of labor,
he was not available for comment.
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