أبوغزاله يكتب

Talal Abu-Ghazaleh

The widening gap between international practices and those in the Arab region within the professional and vocational sector reflects a crisis that goes beyond simply a shortage of skills or variation in the quality of services.
This is closely related to our perception of this type of work and the way we have treated it for decades and perhaps even longer. There is a vast difference between the concept of a craft in the developed world and its perception in our societies. In most of our countries, manual vocations arose in a rudimentary manner, built on the recycling of ignorance and the transmission of mistakes through visual imitation, entirely devoid of any clear assessment standards or institutional qualification.

The image of skilled workers in the developed world differs radically from their counterparts in our societies. There, they have defined educational and professional pathways involving education, training, certificates, licenses, clear standards, legal accountability, and specializations.

In developed nations, a skilled worker holds a recognized profession with status and conditions. Conversely in our region, a large part of this sector operates under a different logic. A young person, often a child forced into the labor market early due to poverty and destitution, learns a vocation in a rudimentary way from a “master” who may himself lack sufficient knowledge and skills, commonly known as the “master and apprentice” system.

To be fair, some of these individuals may indeed be highly skilled, but their proficiency remains tied to personal experience rather than a measurable, verifiable professional system. You may find someone practicing a vocation for twenty years who has never once received organized professional training or a recognized certificate proving their capability.
This is where the problem becomes apparent. When we need a skilled practitioner, citizens cannot always distinguish between a true professional and someone who picked up a few secrets of the profession through trial and error. People may end up paying the price out of their own pockets, and sometimes at expense of the safety of their homes, cars, or facilities. 

To be even fairer, society itself has contributed to perpetuating this situation. We have become accustomed to viewing a university degree as a path to prestige and social status, while regarding vocational trades as an option for those who were unable to complete their education or whose circumstances forced them into such work. This perception has harmed us all.
The economy does not need degree-holders alone; it needs those who know how to handle plumbing, electrical work, tiling, plastering, mechanics, refrigeration, air conditioning, machinery repair, industrial systems, blueprint reading, and execution. It needs people who know how to work with their hands just as well as they know how to think.
To this day, I don’t understand why we treat a student who chooses a vocational occupation as inferior to a peer who chooses a university major, especially when the former is often in higher demand in the job market and more capable of earning a good income.

Thus, we are confronted with a superficial social mindset that prioritizes status over economic value, even as the world around us changes. Countries have built a major part of their industrial strength on the foundation of the vocational workers, providing them with training, licensing, rights, and a clear path for development.
They were never expected to become merely tradespeople, but rather professional workers who understand their responsibilities and recognize their value in the market. In our societies, however, the path to vocational competence remains unclear in many professions; a situation that cannot persist for long.  

Artificial Intelligence (AI), smartphones, educational apps, and open-source technical content have started to change the relationship between tradespeople and consumers. It is no longer possible to confine knowledge in the hands of a single individual, nor can the tradesperson assume the customer is ignorant of technical details. Today, anyone can photograph a malfunction, search for it, read about its possible causes, watch how it is fixed, and even use AI tools to understand the problem before calling a technician. This does not mean people have suddenly become technicians; rather, it means that the monopoly over such knowledge is coming to an end.

It is precisely for this reason that the need for the true professional workers grows greater, not smaller. A technician who knows their work well, will not fear a customer understanding what they are doing, rather, their knowledge, expertise, and diagnostic ability will become the source of their value. As for the person who built their career on guesswork or exploiting people's ignorance, they have no lasting future before the market discards them. I believe this is a critical point for rethinking vocational education in the Arab world.

The world has changed dramatically, and it is no longer acceptable for some of the most vital professions relied upon daily to remain outside the systems of education, qualification, and regulation. The problem is not that we lack a workforce, but that we, as nations and governments, have failed to give manual trades the standing they deserve. If we fail to do so, the gap will only widen between an economy striving to develop, and professions that are still managed in an unregulated market as much as they were in the past. The rest of the world understood early on, that a skilled hand is not merely manual labor; it is part of the capital that builds an economy. In this, nations like Japan, Germany, and China offer us the best examples, which we would be wise to follow.