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MEETING PROMISES SILATECH PROVIDES ACCESS TO SKILLS AND EMPLOYMENT
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Rick Little, CEO of Silatech
year ago, Silatech, established to address the critical and growing need to create jobs and opportunities for young people, first began to roll out its strategy for skills and employment in the region. Silatech was founded in January 2008 by Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned with broad support from other regional and international leaders. One cornerstone of this strategy is the SilaQual initiative (‘SilaTa'heel’ in Arabic) which focuses on large scale employment opportunities that are currently inaccessible to young people due to a lack of suitable training and qualifications. To get access to training, Silatech has formed a strategic partnership with Pearson Education, the world leaders in educational solutions and qualifications, to develop SilaQual into a regional Qualification Awarding Body which provides, accredits and assesses employerled vocational qualifications. Qatar Today spoke to Rick Little, the CEO of Silatech and Jo Aggarwal, Silatech's Director of Access to Skills and Employment about the purpose and unique characteristics of SilaQual, as well as Silatech's progress and experiences to date in providing vocational training and qualifications to youth.
Answering pressing needs
Jo Agarwal, Director of Skills Development, Placement and Counselling, Silatech
On the huge youth bulge in the region, Little says, “There is a large youth bulge in the Middle East and North Africa that could turn into a real opportunity for the economies of this region, provided these young people have the right skills to access employment and enterprise opportunities. However, it is also a well-known fact that, across the MENA region and the world, the link between education and employment is currently broken, and nowhere is this more evident than in the one field that it should work – vocational training. SilaQual is designed to address this issue head on, at scale and in a manner that is sustainable and indigenous to the region.” Silatech's strategy, through SilaQual, is to create institutional mechanisms that address both the demand and supply side gaps, not just now, but even when market conditions change. From the supply perspective, SilaQual works on addressing key 'bottleJUly 10
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“SilaQual tries to address key bottlenecks that prevent the existing public sector infrastructure – vocational and training institutes, universities, and national employment agencies from providing the right skills and employment opportunities to young people.” necks' that prevent the existing public sector infrastructure, specifically vocational and training institutes, universities, and national employment agencies, from providing the right skills and employment opportunities to young people. “For example, across the region we find a lot of investment in physical infrastructure that is unable to deliver results because of a lack of market driven curricula, qualifications, and trained trainers. There are, of course, a multitude of good initiatives that address youth training through 'train-to-job' programmes. However, while these can be very effective in specific instances, they are extremely difficult to scale and sustain without making the public sector capable of offering such programmes directly or in partnership with the private sector. In addition to meeting local needs, it is also important to look at the areas where labour mobility within the region can relieve demographic pressures at one end and meet market needs at the other”, explains Aggarwal. On the demand side, SilaQual works with industry bodies and large employers to identify opportunities for employment and catalyse partnerships with the public sector. To this effect, it has already established strategic relationships with regional employers and developed proof points in the construction, IT, hospitality and tourism sectors. But Aggarwal also makes it clear that SilaQual targets the mass market as its 54
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primary focus area. “SilaQual focuses on the mass market, i.e. areas where there are a large number of jobs but no mechanisms for an employer to identify competence. For instance, in the construction sector, SilaQual is not planning to build curricula and qualifications for surveyors, although this is a key gap in the sector, because the number of jobs in this space is small. Instead, SilaQual focuses on trade skills that make up the bulk of any construction workforce.”
Yemen working model
When asked about the progress of SilaQual to date, Aggarwal, takes us though how the SilaQual model is at work in Yemen now. Aggarwal is enthusiastic about Yemen: “It is a beautiful country that was once known for its craftsmen. Fifteen years ago, in the construction industry, it was said that if you have a Yemeni welder on your team, you would never have a problem. However, due to geo-political changes, domestic projects in Yemen are now importing craftsmen even as Yemen unemployment figures are some of the highest in the region. There was a recent agreement with the GCC for allocating 100,000 visas to Yemeni workers, provided they were trained and qualified. This was an opportunity that had to be tapped.” “Qatari Diar, Consolidated Contractor's Company (CCC) and Shibam Holdings
were our original implementation partners who supported the SilaQual initiative from the very beginning”, explains Aggarwal. With the backing of Qatari Diar, CCC agreed to hire trained and qualified Yemeni workers at their Al Rayyan Hills project in Sana'a. The Ministry of TVET, through its Sana'a Community College, agreed to provide facilities and local trainers, which Silatech helped to develop. The first course delivered through the SilaQual system was in Safe and Productive Work leading to a Health and Safety qualification at an internationally recognised standard. This was a cross cutting need and required only six days of training, creating a large throughput for building the centre's capacity. “We developed 13 Yemeni trainers employed by the public sector as qualified vocational instructors, and then as trainers on the course. Many of them had no construction background, but CCC gave them orientation at the Al Rayyan Hills site. Initially the programme had about 15 students a week, but as the quality of the output became evident, word of mouth spread to subcontractors at the Al Rayyan Hills site and in three months, 75 students a week from six employers were being sent to the course. The course was intensive, but had over 98 percent attendance and every candidate that completed the course was able to achieve the qualification,” says Aggarwal. “In just four months, Silatech and its
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SilaQual's strategic objectives: a: Create an outcome and evidence based bridge of trust between employers and educators. b: Allow employers to identify competent youth in areas of large scale job potential through competency based qualifications. c: Enable public vocational infrastructure to achieve international standards of skills development and assessment. d: Create an accessible and sustainable model of ensuring that the quality of training meets industry needs and provides greater employability to individuals. partners were able to train and accredit over 600 candidates. This level of progress is remarkable, taking into account that the impact was achieved using Yemeni trainers who were training Yemeni workers inside a public sector institution for a specific private sector company, something that had never been done like this before. It also provides a proof point that the SilaQual model can be used to sustain and scale successful initiatives at a local level, while opening up new opportunities for labour mobility - such as the employment of Yemeni construction workers in other parts of the GCC,” she says. Shibam Holdings, one of the original sponsors of the project, is now in the process of setting up a manpower company in Yemen, to connect such trained and qualified workers to opportunities domestically and internationally. “They are able to see a business case for providing Yemeni workers at a better cost, quality and time than South Asian workers and are open to paying for training services from Sana'a Community College”, says Aggarwal. Silatech believes that its recipe for success is to always ensure that all three aspects (as in the box) are in alignment. It is only then that SilaQual's technical experts can build the right qualifications, train local trainers and administrators, and put in place the quality assurance processes required to deliver to local market needs against international professional standards. Working closely with Pearson Education, SilaQual has already developed a robust quality assurance and quality control mechanism which ensures that professional standards are met and maintained. Training centre staff is trained on the relevant processes and consistency is continually measured through the use of
external verifiers from Edexcel (a Pearson organisation) who monitor quality and the process of training and assessment. “The Yemen centre achieved accreditation as a SilaQual Centre in May this year, and the Al Rayyan Hills project has completed over 1 million man-hours of work without a lost time incident, demonstrating a clear business benefit of improved safety at work”, says Aggarwal. Having proven the model with one centre, one course, and a set of employers, Silatech and its partners are now working with the Yemeni Ministry of Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TEVT) in Yemen to scale the program to over 20,000 Yemeni youth, four craft skills courses, 80 trainers, five additional community colleges, and to link Yemeni workers to employment opportunities in the GCC.
National Qualifications and SilaQual
Some countries already have national frameworks in place that work to identify and close gaps in vocational training. How does SilaQual relate to these initiatives? “National qualification frameworks are comprehensive models that take a long time to implement and become effective. They are a key facet of vocational reform in the region, but a long term one – most take 10-12 years to institutionalise. Most initiatives start at a political and technical level, by creating agreements that the qualifications of any one country will be recognised by another. As these initiatives evolve, mutual recognition and equivalence with SilaQuals will eventually create a more joined up system of national, regional and international qualifications, and thereby facilitate the kind of labour mobility SilaQual is already supporting today”, says Aggarwal.
“SilaQual has a more immediate impact, because it starts from a youth employment perspective and only focuses on areas that current training and qualification models are unable to solve. By focusing on youth employment, engaging regional employers and identifying market opportunities directly, and enabling the vocational infrastructure to meet this need, SilaQual offers a unique solution to the problems many years of reform and thousands upon thousands of training programs have, so far, been unable to solve. As the private sector sees the quality of the output from accredited centres, mindsets will change and more employers and institutes will join the transformation process. SilaQual's role, therefore, is to ensure the quality of each accredited centre and to make sure that as market needs change, curricula and qualifications keep pace.”
Way Forward
With its initial proof points in place in countries like Yemen, Silatech and its partners are now planning to take SilaQual forward and have already identified a number of opportunities in other countries. “For every new initiative, it is critical that we identify where there are opportunities for large scale jobs, where we can have a catalytic impact through a small amount of seed funding, and where we find partners in both the private and public sector who are willing to address the issue in a sustainable manner. We are already working on replicating the SilaQual model by taking the construction skills program to other countries in the region with our partners Qatari Diar and CCC, scaling existing programs we have in Morocco around Offshoring, ICT and Tourism, and entering a number of additional sectors next year”, says Aggarwal n JUly 10
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