Engineering degrees are highly sought in Jordan, demanding in terms
of academic rigor, and costly. But in terms of employment, recent data shows
that they are not rewarding. In fact, about one third (even close to 40 percent
in some fields) of engineers are unemployed.
اضافة اعلان
What is the cause of this and how can the situation
be remedied?
Jordanian engineers are among the best in the region
and can hold their own in any advanced country. As students, they are selected
from among the brightest, and are well trained, whether locally or in developed
countries. The Engineers Association only grants membership, which is license
to work as engineers, to graduates of accredited universities.
The road toward engineering degrees is fraught with
steep requirements: high scores in the General Secondary Education Certificate
Examination (Tawjihi), higher university fees than most other majors, and
longer years of study. Yet, there is an abundance of engineers.
There are close to 190,000 engineers in Jordan,
which means that one out of 10 persons in the national labor force is an
engineer; recent estimates show that their numbers grow at close to 8 percent
per year. Additionally, there are over 40,000 at universities in Jordan and
abroad that will be vying to join the labor market soon.
The government must also set the direction of change and use all the tools available to drive the economy toward greater productivity, innovation, R&D, value added, and resilience.
Since the 1970s, Jordan has been a supplier of
engineers (mainly civil engineers) to the oil rich GCC countries. Currently,
there are 26,000 engineers working there: almost three quarters work in Saudi
Arabia, 20 percent in the UAE, and the remainder in Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain.
Their employment generates an inflow of remittances
to the Jordanian economy. However, the employment and remittances vacillate
with the rise and fall in oil prices, thus almost making Jordan an
oil-dependent economy without oil.
Unemployment among engineers, at 32 percent, is
higher than the national unemployment rate of 22.3 percent. Architectural
engineering suffers the highest unemployment rate (38 percent), followed by
civil engineering (34 percent), and electrical and mechanical engineering (31
percent and 30 percent respectively).
Not only is the government in Jordan unable to
affect the demand for engineers overseas, it is, due to cuts in capital
expenditures, hardly hiring locally. Also, the private sector has suffered what
may be the longest economic depression in recorded history. And, the economy in
Jordan has not been able to boost productivity since 1988 — the real income per
capita in Jordan remains lower than that of 34 years ago.
This also means that production is low value added,
and requires little to no skill. In addition, Jordan suffers from growing
joblessness because the bulk of economic growth is basically in the
construction sector, which attracts unskilled guest workers, and hardly creates
jobs for skilled Jordanians. Therefore, engineers are worse hit by the
depression than most.
The fact that many engineers are unemployed can be
easily explained by the dearth of high value-added production and products,
which require highly skilled workers, especially engineers, to produce. Without
demand from the private sector, the engineers’ human capital and its potential
will be wasted further.
To move into high value-added production, the
government must play a major, and necessary, role. It must support new
projects, entrepreneurship, startups, and innovation, activities that are
currently relegated to programs that are funded by foreign aid.
The government must also set the direction of change
and use all the tools available to drive the economy toward greater
productivity, innovation, R&D, value added, and resilience.
It should borrow and assume more debt to grow
product complexity in a mission-driven approach, and use all fiscal and
monetary tools to drive and cause the change that puts the engineers to work.
Yusuf Mansur is CEO of the Envision Consulting Group and
former minister of state for economic affairs.
Read more Opinion and Analysis
Jordan News
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