Private sector expected to hire more Omanis as government sector opportunities dwindle

April 11, 2017 

Muscat - Government hiring may come down to as low as ten per cent in the next four years, Younis al Akhzami, the CEO of Public Authority for Manpower Register (PAMR), said. Every year, 35,000 fresh job seekers enter the market.

The private sector would have to comprise remaining 90 per cent of the hiring during the remaining years of the ninth Five Year Plan (2016-20), he said at a career fair held at the Waljat College of Applied Sciences on Tuesday.

“There is no government employment. Maybe maximum ten per cent. The government cannot take more,” he told Muscat Daily. “When the government was able to hire, it hired. But the next five years [beginning last year], employment will depend on the private sector.”

The projected numbers contrast deeply with the hiring during the last Five Year Plan (2011-15). During that period, the government comprised 150,000 of the 170,000 hires, and the private sector about 20,000.

He described the public sector as “saturated”. In the last major public sector hiring in 2011, thousands joined the army and police. But that cannot be done anymore, he said. He said public hiring would be limited to areas such as health and education. There are currently 35,000 unemployed, of which 70 per cent are women, Akhzami said.

He called on the private sector to help drive employment. “What we are really hoping is the other sectors to come up and employ our graduates, our job seekers,” he said. “All of us should cooperate and try to find jobs for Omanis.”

Akhzami pointed to the potential of programmes such as Tanfeedh to create jobs in fields such as tourism, logistics and manufacturing. “If it is developed the way it is planned, it can take all of these numbers.”

Part of the authority’s strategy is creating a new online job recruitment system called NIMR (National Integration of Manpower Records), which should be launched by the end of the year.

Whereas now job seekers only register with the authority, the site will allow them to search for jobs on their own. It will list all government and private sector job openings, and seekers can try to match their skills to the job.

Akhzami said it is intended to replicate private sector job recruitment sites, but uses the government’s registry. “All the job seekers and job providers can integrate their data into one system,” he added.

© Muscat Daily 2017