A bias against vocational training is discouraging many Emiratis from taking courses that could get them jobs, a senior Abu Dhabi education official says.
Prof Jim Mienczakowski, the head of higher education at the Abu Dhabi Education Council (ADEC), said young Emiratis needed to be convinced that vocational training was not inferior to academic study.
His comments come ahead of the opening of new vocational education centres in Al Ain and Madinat Zayed.
“We are working hard to overcome the perception of higher education and university degrees – and the type of careers involved – as being superior to vocational education.
“They are different approaches to learning and both are extremely important to any developed or developing economy.”
Prof Mienczakowski, who worked in senior management at Australian universities before joining ADEC, said he had met many people with degrees who later decided to take vocational training to help enhance their career prospects.
“From this, they have developed a better understanding of the industries they are working in and got an edge in employability,” he said.
The two new vocational training centres, the Al Ain Vocational Education Training Institute and the Western Region Vocational Training Institute, are due to open in September for Emirati students.
They will offer diplomas in a variety of sectors including electronics, mechanical engineering, IT, nursing and interior design.
A German company, GTZ, has been contracted to manage the centres.
Classes will be taught in English.
Walter Fehlinger, a project manager for GTZ, said the centres would give UAE nationals ideas for careers they had not considered in the past.
The company would be carrying out studies to find out “exactly what is needed” in terms of skills in Al Ain and Madinat Zayed, he said.
“We’ll look at what the employers are looking for, and what’s possible in this culture and what’s not possible.”
Former school buildings will be refurbished to act as the centres’ temporary homes, but within three years work should start on new facilities.
Students will sign up for three-year diploma courses, at the end of which they should be ready to work or start university.
The first year will focus on a basic grounding in English, mathematics and science before students specialise in their areas of interest.
Peter Michael Schmidt, the executive director of GTZ, said vocational training was “about much more” than producing sufficient numbers of people with the skills industry and commerce needed.
“It’s the future of the country,” he said.
The institutes will have just a few hundred students when they launch in September, but eventually student numbers in Al Ain will increase to about 3,000 and in Madinat Zayed to about 2,000.
In Al Ain, between 60 and 70 per cent of the students are expected to be female, while in Madinat Zayed the proportion of females is likely to be even higher.
This ties in with the pattern across the UAE, where about 60 per cent of higher education students are female.
GTZ, based near Frankfurt, runs similar vocational education centres in dozens of countries, including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Most of the teachers at the new centres are likely to come from Germany, but others will be brought in from other European countries as well as Arab nations such as Egypt and Jordan.
The creation of the new centres follows last September’s launch of the Abu Dhabi Vocational Education and Training Institute (Adveti), which offers similar three-year diploma courses.
Adveti is run by TAFE New South Wales, the largest vocational and training provider in Australia.
Daniel Bardsley