Ahmed Afifi, Emad Hamza, Mohamed Samy and Maysa Ismail used to be part of the problem; now, after living, studying and working in the United States, they are better equipped to be part of the solution.
A frequently heard complaint from Egypt's business community is the lack of practical job skills among new college graduates. In a culture that values high-status professionals like doctors and engineers over mechanics and technicians, it is not entirely surprising that during a time of staggeringly high youth unemployment, jobs go unfilled.
Many experts contend that closing the country's youth employment gap will require changing popular attitudes and retooling an elitist education system that is out of touch with the job-skill requirements of a global economy. That is exactly what the Fulbright Program did in 2005.
Since the Fulbright Act was signed into law in 1946 by US President Harry Truman, the venerable program has been guided by its mission to promote "international good will through the exchange of students in the fields of education, culture and science." The legislation and program are named for the late J. William Fulbright, an influential Arkansas senator who was the longest-serving chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. The Fulbright Program has supported about 310,000 participants and today operates in 155 countries.
Established in 1949, the Fulbright Commission in Egypt is the program's oldest and largest bilateral commission in the Arab world. Traditionally, Fulbright funding has supported scholarship efforts in academic areas, but since 2005 the commission has sent Afifi, Hamza, Samy, Ismail and more than 800 other Egyptian young people to the United States for vocational education under the US State Department's Community College Initiative.
Bruce Lohof, executive director of the Egypt office, says the initiative began with a $57 million grant from USAID to send 1,000 young people for training at US community colleges. The Egypt office partnered with Community Colleges for International Development, one of the consortiums responsible for meeting participants on their arrival, assigning them to colleges and providing stipends, tuition and lodging. "We selected the students and put them on a plane," Lohof says.
Fulbright had to design a selection process that focused on applicants who were most likely to benefit from a community college education, primarily young adults working in a sector other than their field of study in college. The initiative included a year of study for a certificate in agriculture, tourism, business management, IT, journalism, nursing or applied engineering, everything from construction to air conditioning repair. Recipients had the option of staying a second year to earn an associate degree.
Almost three-quarters of participants were from outside Cairo; women were a minority of applicants and only 11 percent of participants. To open the selection process, Fulbright set no English requirement, instead providing six months of intensive language training before send-off.
New York and Los Angeles are world class cities, well known among young Egyptians. Less famous are cities like Green Bay, Bellingham, Sacramento and other out-of-the-way postings. No matter where they studied, participants say there were valuable lessons to be learned both in college classrooms and the communities at large. Many volunteered and took part in cultural exchanges, and say they savored an open society, learning the value of diversity and gaining an understanding of Western business culture.
Ahmed Afifi
After working his way through Cairo University as a bellhop, Afifi wanted something more. He had earned a bachelor's degree in commerce, but he was not moving up in the hospitality sector. He heard about the Fulbright program three days before the application deadline and was floored when he received a call telling him he was accepted, even calling back to make sure there was no mistake. For six months, he juggled work and Fulbright's intensive English program. "I would work eight hours overnight, sleep four or five hours, then wake up to prepare for class and exams," he says.
Afifi attended Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, Washington, just across the border from Vancouver, Canada.
In 2010, he received an associate degree in hospitality and tourism management, completing the curriculum in half the usual time. Between semesters, he had a monthlong internship at a Four Seasons Hotel in Hawaii, supervising restaurant preparations for Christmas Eve and New Year's parties.
"I learned how to interact with everybody... America is like a mix of the world," he says. "I found a lot of people who were excited to learn about our culture and traditions." Afifi gave presentations on Egyptian and Islamic culture to high school classes, conferences and Rotary Clubs.
When he returned to Egypt, he was hired as a coordinator of group events for tourists by the Semiramis Inter- Continental Cairo, where he had previously worked as a bellhop. Afifi says he returned with a better understanding of "the needs and ways of thinking of American companies."
And the InterContinental Hotels Group took note. Early last month, he was promoted to event coordinator and specialist at the group's marquee Dubai Festival City InterContinental. "My dream is to work in headquarters," Afifi says.
Emad Hamza
Emad Hamza is not one to let an opportunity pass. When working as an information technology trainer after getting a bachelor's degree in management information systems at Cairo University, Hamza found himself promoted to a supervisory position and feeling somewhat unprepared. "I needed better HR skills," he recalls.
So when he heard about the community college initiative, he jumped at the opportunity. Hamza ended up getting a certificate in business management from Sacramento City College and "falling in love with California." He won a leadership award for volunteer efforts, which included speaking at high schools about Egypt and Islam, and says the big lesson from his time abroad was "learning to accept others."
After earning an associate degree in 2010, he was working in the continuing education department at Cairo University when another opportunity walked through the door. The vacationing head of the Chicago Institute of Business, a company that provides practical education to recent college graduates and career professionals, stopped in to see what executive education programs were available. "We were talking and I said, 'Why don't you just open an office here?" With Hamza's help, the institute did just that.
Since September, he has been working in the Chicago Institute of Business training branch at Smart Village. And he has not neglected his own professional development, earning a certificate in human resources from Cairo University.
Mohamed Samy
Mohamed Samy is passionate about human resources. "In short, people matter," he says, adding that though Egyptians are some of the nicest people in the world, "when it comes to customer service, it's different from in the States."
At Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company where he works as a training and development associate, Samy explains how he applied his customer-comes-first attitude while hosting a group of university students earlier that day: "I spent the whole day running around making sure everything for their visit is excellent... and they leave excited about Lilly."
At the core of this philosophy is a simple piece of advice: "Be nice to people. It means a lot." It is an idea he developed at Houston's Lone Star College in the 2010-2011 academic year as he studied management, outreach, training and development techniques the he uses in job at Lilly.
While in Texas, he got as much out of the social and professional development as he did academic coursework. When his friends found out he was going to Texas, they joked, "Good luck, cowboy." But Houston is the center of the American oil industry and, as Samy points out, "HR is all about networking." He joined three committees in Houston, including a scholarship board with HR officers from major international firms that developed tools to rank scholarship applications.
After graduation with a microbiology degree from Al-Azhar University in 2006, Samy worked as an environmental project coordinator for Cairo University and found he liked working with people more than microbes. He moved to Rashideen Egypt and started a postgraduate degree in human resources at AUC. After being accepted by the community college initiative, Samy spent the next six months finishing his certificate work at AUC, working full-time and taking Fulbright's intensive English classes.
Once he's settled in at Lilly, Samy would like to lecture part-time in human resources at AUC. "I just like to keep moving," he says.
Maysa Ismail
In 2002, Maysa Ismail earned a BA in archaeology and Egyptology from Helwan University. But she was working in marketing with Evyap, a Turkish consumer products company, when she applied to the Community College Initiative. She went to Northeast Wisconsin Technical College in Green Bay, where she made perfect grades en route to a global business certificate. Ismail interned with Schreiber Foods, Green Bay's biggest employer, working on dairy marketing in the MENA region.
Volunteering is a program requirement, one that Ismail embraced. Egyptians found their volunteering ethos after the revolution, she says. "Before, never: we didn't have this in our culture." She came back to Egypt in August 2010 and jumped into activism. "I learned how to be a team player in the States. ... I used that in political movements back in Egypt." Some friends joked she was an America-influenced agitator. Her efforts led to El Taharok El Igaby, or Positive Movement, which helped form the Egyptian Bloc (El Kotla El Masreya), a coalition of liberal parties.
Ismail's vision is to build a network of community advocacy training centers, to establish a grassroots liberal presence that can serve as a counterweight to Islamist parties' charity networks. While such networks provide immediate assistance in the form of bread and oil, they breed dependence on the same services, she says. The idea is to address problem solving at a base level - a challenge many employers face as well. "We're going to teach them how to solve their own problems," Ismail says. The inaugural class took place April 21 with 15 advocates selected by NGOs. Political parties from the Egyptian Bloc supplied trainers and space.
Ismail is able to spend so much time on the current project because she is unemployed and looking for work in politics or development or marketing. She explains that in addition to the weak economy, high expectations make finding jobs hard: alumni of the initiative feel they are above menial work, while employers expect flawless English. Immediately upon returning from America, Ismail worked for a few months but quit due to what she perceived as a lack of professionalism. "I regret doing that," she says.
The initial USAID grant for the Community College Initiative has been spent, but alternate funding has been found to continue the program on a much smaller scale (it plans to send 15 students next year). In addition, the Fulbright Commission in Egypt has established a resume bank for program alumni with the American Chamber of Commerce in Egypt. The commission also hosts job fairs - the next one is planned for September - and resume workshops.
In a commission survey of alumni in Egypt a year ago, about half were employed. Hana Emad, a former Fulbright Commission employee, is reviewing the Community College Initiative as part of her master's thesis at the American University in Cairo. In February, she found that two-thirds of respondents reported being employed.
Commission executive director Lohof is not happy with the job placement figures against the backdrop of high unemployment and employers in desperate need of the skills that program participants developed in the United States: "They need these kids, here are mine, use them... More employers need to know about this pool of people who are trained and ready to work."
© Business Monthly 2012
