SkyHive by Cornerstone and the Abdulla Al Ghurair Foundation (AGF) have embarked on a five-year partnership to match Emirati and Arab youth with jobs, a major advance toward a skill-based labor market in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Massar Al Ghurair (“route” or “course” in Arabic) will match young people with jobs and learning opportunities based on SkyHive’s Skill Passport™ platform. Massar Al Ghurair will eventually serve up to 45,000 learners, 50 employers, and 20 training providers, and ultimately will be available to young people elsewhere in the Arab world.
The UAE has one of the strongest economies in the Middle East, but it has labor market challenges. Nine in ten UAE workers are expatriates, and employers say they can’t find enough skilled workers. Youth unemployment is three times the overall unemployment rate.
To address this, the UAE is implementing a policy of “Emiratization,” or increasing the number of Emiratis employed. The government has set targets for private sector employers to increase the number of Emiratis employed by 1% every six months.
A key element needed to succeed in this policy is ensuring Emiratis have the right skills. But like many other labor markets around the world, there are no easy ways for the four sides of the labor market (learners/workers, employers, educators, and governments/communities) to connect. Workers don’t necessarily know what skills they need, or where to learn them. Educators don’t always know what skills employers want, while employers don’t know what training pipelines to tap.
The Massar Al Ghurair program will provide all the key participants in the labor market with a comprehensive set of services, including:
- A unified hub for learners with individual skills-based profiles;
- Guidance and recommendations to learners for upskilling, based on potential jobs, skills and professional aspirations;
- A system to track the progress of learners;
- A job matching system, based on the learner’s skills, interests, location, and preferences;
- Access to available jobs in the UAE, and eventually the broader region; and,
- Labor market analysis covering both supply and demand, with trends and recommendations.
Massar Al Ghurair participants will be able to upload their CVs to the system, along with their career goals. The system will match them with available jobs based on their current skills, and identify any weak areas. In effect, the system will analyze a user’s personal skills gap.
Even more importantly, the system will show the career pathways to future jobs, based on real-life advancement in millions of career profiles. The analysis will show exactly what skills a learner or worker needs to develop to reach the next steps in their career, and connect them with the right learning providers.
Employers and educators can also use the skills data analysis to understand what emerging skills they will need to develop (or teach) in the future.
SkyHive is uniquely positioned for the Massar Al Ghurair project because it can analyze skills from job postings and career profiles in 11 languages, including Arabic. This allows Skill Passport to provide job matching and career pathways that match local opportunities.
Another major feature empowers the key players in the Emirati job market to define the problems themselves and share the solutions. Massar Al Ghurair will support Hives, a Skill Passport feature that enables "micro ecosystems” of the four stakeholder groups to collaborate together.
Hives are flexible, global, and user-generated; they can be focused on regional imbalances, industry-specific skill gaps, or other labor market issues. Any ecosystem stakeholder can create a Hive and find relevant educators, employers, or learners/workers to participate.
Hives can cross national and cultural boundaries–and the fact that Skill Passport provides a common language of skills enables a shared base of information and analysis. This is particularly critical since different stakeholders often define the same skills and jobs in different ways.
In addition to the youth unemployment hive in the UAE, developed as part of Massar Al Ghurair, SkyHive has active Hives around the world on a number of issues, including an energy sector hive in Canada and aquaculture hives in southern Europe surrounding the Mediterranean.
All of these features will be powered by SkyHive, which is Armilla Verified as free from AI bias and has partnered with a number of organizations with similar goals, such as Opportunity@Work and JobsFirstNYC.
For more on Massar Al Ghurair, read the press release.
A passport helps people travel. Skill Passport helps them transform. To find out more about how Skill Passport can connect the four corners of your labor market–learners/workers, educators, employers, and governments/communities – reach out to SkyHive today.
