Monday 16 / September / 2024
The employment market in Oman is squeezing out graduates where tens of thousands of applicants chase very few jobs.
With more students graduating, the very tight job market is missing out a lot of unemployed graduates where they see very few openings. It is not untypical for a company looking to employ a dozen graduates to get up to 5,000 applicants.
Statistics show that there are over 50,000 job seekers for every advertised job. Taking in consideration that the population of Omani nationals in the country is less than three millions, the ratio of job seekers and vacancies is very high.
As we stand now, there are no signs that the employment will pick up for the rest of the year. Next year might be a rollover of this year. We need to work much harder to support the rate of employment for 2025 to be different. Job scarcity also effect the private sector. Companies are worried about the sustainability of business recovery. Less people employed simply means less spending. The private sector needs graduates to get jobs to stay afloat. As more shops pull down their shutters, the economy cannot support the private sector.
There are side effects of having thousands of young people doing nothing at home. Being idle attracts a lot of mischief. They get into depression, to start with. A fair number of them, never recover from it. To forget their miseries, some even get into drugs. The worse scenario is that long time employment leads to crimes when young people look for money. Typically, many graduates get rejected so many times that they lose all hopes of ever getting employed. This may well lead to all kinds of psychological problems and instability in young their lives.
So what is exactly causing high unemployment in the country? Is it low profitability of the hiring companies? Or the economy is very sluggish to support companies and organisations? A report of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) blames regulations if a country persistently has low employment rate. Oman, like the rest of the Gulf countries, has been heavily depending on foreign labour for a number of years.
So it is easy to blame regulations for not reserving enough jobs for the nationals. However, in the last five years, Oman has consistently changed employment regulations by reserving some jobs specializations to Omani nationals. But so far it has not been working like it was expected. There are many reasons for that, including a cover up tactics by employers to get around the system by manipulation of job positions.
But the biggest factor behind the inability of any country not to raise enough jobs for their nationals is that there is no expansion of the economy. This happens when business owners do not expand and sit on their laurels. Or just simply, they are too cautious to venture further afield. This leads to the stagnation of the economy where any country cannot move forward economically. However, to achieve the equilibrium between business expansion and employment, a third factor is important.
It is to seriously open up for foreign investments. It is very obvious that local companies can no longer generate enough jobs for the nationals. So, Oman needs to overcome all obstacles that prevent more foreign companies to set up businesses to give the country a chance to generate more jobs.
