The Education to Employment Gap - My view 10 years on

The gap between what graduates of higher education can do and what employers actually need is a well-documented challenge to nationalisation in the region. In 10 years of living in the GCC, I still hear the same challenges of aligning education and the labour market. Over this time the same rhetoric of the need to develop critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork etc is still being discussed by employers and those in the education system. While I have seen some significant progress in embedding 21st century skills into national education curriculums, employers are still saying many of their employees still lack these 21st century skills. This poses the question of how can these skills be developed on the job, rather than through education, and what employers can do to support this? Developing these skills in the workplace is made more difficult by some training providers who do not actively engage employers at a detailed skill level to ensure alignment with job requirements and therefore, impact of training. It is time for a rethink how we can closer align professional development and actual job skill requirements.

Ideally job roles would have clear career progression pathways and professional standards. This would allow HR professionals to embed the profession standards into organisation competency frameworks, job descriptions and performance management systems. This could also be further aligned by nationalisation funding agencies who can channel funding on the progression of career pathways. For some industries with technical skills requirements, international professional qualifications are used for this purpose such as ACCA for accounting etc. These professional qualifications offer clear skills maps and standards for the profession that provide a good framework for employers to use in job descriptions etc. While this is helpful, these professional qualifications are not contextualised to the needs of this region and are usually very UK or USA centric. While technical 'hard' skills are obvious, what about the more generic ‘soft’ skills, or 21st century skills? These are harder to build, more difficult to identify and harder to measure posing a challenge for employers who say there is still a clear skills gap in these areas.

The World Economic Forum (2019) highlights the need for the GCC to move away from university-based qualifications and focus on skills-based credentials. While education is helpful to get a job, the skills required to do well in the workplace may be very different. In Europe professional apprenticeships have become a popular way of ensuring education, skills and job requirements are aligned. These apprenticeships programmes are developed through partnerships of industry professional bodies/skills councils and education providers. Learners can develop a portfolio of skills during their apprenticeship that allows them to clearly demonstrate what they can do, including evidence of the application of soft skills on the job.

I believe that here in the Kingdom of Bahrain there is significant opportunity to set up similar models of applied learning and an emphasis on developing skills, rather than qualification. However, this would require a rethink of some of the traditional views of education and employment. For example, many apprenticeship systems follow evidence-based assessment criteria where learning is identified and observed on the job. Some other learning systems use the Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL) for this purpose. Evidence based learning as a formal process is not widely used in the Kingdom of Bahrain. I believe it is also not well understood by many important parts of the skills eco system include the HR Professionals in the workplace who are often tasked with addressing the skills gaps through training.

We need to consider shifting our focus purely from education to that of a skills eco system that includes education, employers, training and funders. I believe that when all those parties are coordinated toward the development of skills in different industry sectors we will see higher levels of impact from training and investments in nationalisation.