The Industrial Training Center's advertising campaign seeks to connect workers, skills and jobs
This past Ramadan brought what could be considered a miracle for the nation's unemployed. As we sat around the TV set, laughing at Yehia El-Fakharany playing an oversized baby and cheered Youssra's fight for justice after her characgter was raped, a disembodied voice emerged during the commercial break. "Dial 16456," the voice intoned, "and you are guaranteed a job."
It was not the voice of an angel but of the Industrial Training Center (ITC), a recently created chamber of the 85-year-old Federation of Egyptian Industries created with the support of the Ministry of Trade and Industry. As its name implies, the ITC's task is not simply to act as an employment agency, but to train people to meet the demands of the job market they want to enter. To do this, the center has secured a budget of LE 3.9 billion for the next five years.
According to Mohamed El-Sewedy, a member of ITC's executive board, studies conducted by the center showed that unemployment is caused not by too many workers or too few jobs, but a missing bridge between the two. "We always hear about the high percentage of unemployment in Egypt and on the other side, we hear [the] industry complaining about the lack of workers." The ITC, he says, is meant to bridge that gap, bringing much-needed workers into factories and much-needed cash into workers' pockets.
Mohamed El Assuity, a manager at El-Sewedy Cables, can attest to this labor gap and the problem it poses for companies in need of workers with advanced technical skills. "We are a growing company, and as we grow we need more workers. We need people who understand [technical] power and control. We are a private company, and we need human resources regardless of any governmental projects."
Ragi Mahmoud, ITC's projects manager and the man behind the ad, discovered that people could have bachelor degrees in technical fields and still not know what was needed to make a factory work. "This is the problem. The educational system in Egypt does not produce the skills required by the industry. We are here to bridge this [knowledge] gap."
But ITC's job is more than just slapping bandages on the holes in graduates' skill sets. The members of ITC are also out to change the 'culture of work' in Egyptian society entirely.
"The dilemma is that Egyptian youth always look down at vocational jobs," El-Sewedy explains. "They always believe that working as laborers is not prestigious and therefore will have a negative impact on their social status, being university graduates."
Mervat Abu Oaf, a professor of mass communications at the American University in Cairo and the editor-in-chief of the marketing magazine AdLife, thinks the TV spot addressed just this issue. Abu Oaf references one version of the ad, in which a young man starts as a factory worker and rises to become a manager, while another sits at a café waiting to land a desk job until "the train passes him by" as the faceless voice claimed solemnly.
"I think the part that I as a person would focus on," Abu Oaf notes, "is that this job led to another job, that led to another job and then I would achieve my dream."
Eureka!
For some, that arrow hit a bullseye. Twenty-two-year-old Mustafa Ali has moved from one technical school to another, getting more advanced certificates and putting off the moment when he has to start job hunting. He admits that the recurring image of sitting at a café, day in and day out, shook him out of the delusion that he could live off his parents until a job that suited his credentials came along.
"No one gets a chance to sit at a desk with a laptop in front of him as soon as they graduate. You have to work hard to get the high jobs," he admits. "You're never going to learn what the market is like if you move straight to the desk job. You've got to start with something small and grow with it."
thing small' in your field?
Mohamad Ghandour was this year's top graduate in graphic media from the Institute of Applied Arts. He saw the ad but thought it was "too difficult for someone like me with an IGCSE certificate and the highest BA in my institute to accept manual labor. What is the small thing that I can start off with in my area? There is no such thing here."
Ghandour claims he is one of many denied positions as a teacher's assistant because "relatives of someone in parliament" took them, although the rule states that the top five graduates earn those positions. "Neither me nor the second, third, fourth or fifth were hired as TAs, [but] the thirteenth and fourteenth were hired, he asserts."
Since 2004, Ghandour has become increasingly frustrated with his job hunt, failing to find work because people with connections allegedly took the positions or because "big companies say you'll work for six months, and we may or may not pay you then, [and] smaller companies say your salaries are too high."
Ghandour takes umbrage at ITC's TV ad. "People with lower grades than me got the job I was meant to get. Does that mean I have to take the lower job that maybe [they were] was meant to take?" he says. "This isn't a flaw in the job market; this is a flaw in the people who control it."
Wherever the flaw lies, the situation has added to people's deep distrust of anything governmental. Abu Oaf thinks that the ads -- whether those about unemployment or those encouraging people to pay taxes -- may help with this. "If I am telling you that I am changing my approach, this is an announcement that my approach is wrong," she says. "Many of us mistrust taxes, we're not sure that every penny we pay is not going to be taken by the government itself. The ads are an announcement that we [the government] know we are mistrusted and we are trying to do something about it. This in itself is an achievement."
Ahmed Hafez, 21, another technical school graduate who says he has trust issues with the government, decided to take up the ITC offer. He is now working as a supervisor of concrete in a private construction company for LE 350 a month. "I am happy, not because this is better than nothing, but because they fulfilled their promise of training us and getting us jobs."
For ITC's Mahmoud, the ad was meant to eliminate a need for trust in the first place there are no government promises to break. "People think that the government is committed to hire them because they graduated from university. We want to convince these people that the government isn't going to give anyone a job. So it's much better if you get a job that is much less than your degree than to sit at the café."
An Uncertain Outlook
One source of public distrust is the discrepancy among unemployment figures published by official and international sources. Official government sources claim the unemployment rate is a mere four percent, while the US Central Intelligence Agency Factbook, the United Nations and the International Labour Force Survey put the figure at somewhere between 10 and 12 percent.
Even those figures are slightly distorted, says Seif Abu Zeid, a co-owner of the Agency for Development and Advancement (ADAA), an NGO that works on developing leadership skills in Egyptian youth. A discrepancy between the figures and what is on the ground, explains Abu Zeid, arises because employment rates only take into account those in the workforce, i.e. those in jobs and those seeking jobs, not those sitting idle in cafes.
"The labor force is 64 percent of the population, so if you look at unemployment from that perspective, it will give you quite an optimistic figure," he says. "But if you have a birds-eye view, you'll find a lot of people are not even seeking jobs, which is the problem. So the solution is to find these people and encourage them either to be self-employed or to create job opportunities for them."
Though Egypt still has a long road to travel in this regard, ITC is headed in the right direction. Dialing a hotline number has done the trick for at least 50 graduates of technical or industrial schooling who managed to land jobs, and tens more are still in the training process. The next step for ITC is to upgrade the infrastructure, curricula and instructors of public technical schools.
Then, maybe, Egypt's cafe-bound masses will get up and start slowly making their own paths to success.
By Riham El Houshi
© Business Today Egypt 2008
