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.