Ministry draws up plan to lure citizens to private sector Wednesday, 22 February 2012 00:57

By ALI ABDELMOATY

DOHA: The Ministry of Labour has come up with an innovative plan to push nationals into expatriate-dominated private sector to take up jobs.

The five-year plan aims at helping Qatari students gear themselves up professionally from the secondary school level to compete in the local employment market. As part of a five-year plan, the Ministry hopes to wage an awareness campaign targeting Qatari students of secondary schools about professional standards required to get into the expatriate-friendly private sector.

The Ministry wants private companies to provide it details of their manpower needs until 2015, what specialised jobs they have and need in the next few years and how many citizens they have in their employ, local Arabic daily Al Raya reported on Sunday.

The Ministry, according to the daily, is obliquely critical of the industrial sector as its report says that some 78 percent of companies from the sector do not even respond to the state job nationalisation plan.

Banks and financial services providers as well as insurance companies are the largest employers of Qatari workforce followed by the hospitality sector and transport industry.

The Ministry wants the private sector to train citizens so they could not only take up ordinary jobs in the sector but also seek leadership positions.

The Ministry’s aim is to identify the kind of private jobs, including those that need specialisations that citizens can take up over the next few years, to begin with. These also include leadership positions.

The Ministry has plans to conduct several short training programmes, of two weeks, for instance, for those male and female Qatari students who are fresh out of secondary schools so they could be employed in hotels, banks and insurance companies.

Since the private sector is set to play a major role in the national economy with mega public projects being launched, there must be a close partnership with private players and the labour ministry, the report said.

The Peninsula

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