25/05/2010
Al-Alam Alyom Newspaper 2010/MAY /25
With only 5% of students entering university and the other 95% exposed to market temptations, this causes problems in the future, as it reduces their chances of better jobs and deprives business owners from making effective and productive workers out of them. There is a labor shortage reflected by the vacant jobs in factories in need of laborers. Establishing employment centers like those in Europe, the US and other advanced countries that are fully supervised would be responsible for linking factory and company needs with job market requirements.(Available in Arabic – German in PDF )
Five years of many funded training programs failed to satisfy market requirements. Inappropriate approaches were adopted that turned us away from the original focus that we needed to achieve the aspired-after goals of training courses. Budgets could have been used to support education to train students in up-to-date production methods and this would have produced skilled, qualified labor. Large factories account for 1% of the total factories in Egypt. They are capable of founding training centers or of support for workers with money to get qualification courses. Medium-sized make up 2% but they do not have enough resources to fund this. Some 97% of businesses in Egypt either lack qualified labor or do not understand the importance of training. All factories in the 10th of Ramadan City are facing a labor shortage problem with the main problem being the output of education not suiting the production process. Weak salaries and workers shifting to other jobs with bigger salaries is another problem related to the labor shortage. The Mubarak-Kohl initiative can be developed to be a copy of the German experiment, through two Ministries; Manpower and Trade and Industry, which have more than 150 vocational training centers across the country.