Developing work ethics is the key to achieving the desired Saudization target, said Dr. Sharif Elabdelwahab, the new chief of the King Fahd National Employment Center. Private companies and establishments with certain exceptions should achieve a 30 percent rate of Saudization by mid-2010, according to a recent announcement by the Ministry of Labor. Dr. Elabdelwahab said young Saudi job seekers should first learn the lesson of work ethics, and then the desired Saudization efforts will bear fruit in the due course of time. However, to make this happen the concerned human resources departments, educational specialists, municipal authorities and recruitment agencies in the public and private sectors must cooperate and develop a strategy, he said. Saudi work ethics should be the topic of discussion among the human resources or recruitment departments of any company whether in the public or private sector, he said. Managers and recruiters are always talking about the anguish of employing a Saudi with no work ethics, he said. “After studying the Saudization efforts in 13 different Saudi directorates, it is clear that the work ethics differ significantly, sometimes even within the same directorate,” he said. Saudi job seekers, in general, lack the basic principles of work ethics which makes it difficult for them to function effectively in the workplace. An occupation of any kind has its own work ethics that involve a number of on-the-job challenges that young Saudis must face,” Dr. Elabdelwahab said. However, a job seeker can only be permanently on the payroll of a company when he/she shows the determination to meet the job specific challenges, he said. Saudi youth have a lot of talent that can be tapped in order to prepare them for the job market. Even schoolchildren can emerge as skilled workers with good work ethics, he said. Dr. Elabdelwahab spoked about a visit to a fish market in Qatif where he saw exemplary work ethics among young Saudis. He bought shrimps from young Saudi vendors and asked them to clean them. This was basically to test the skills and work behavior of young Saudis in the market, he said. He said that cleaning jobs in Saudi society are considered menial work for which foreign workers are usually hired. “I expected a few foreign workers would clean the shrimps and carry them to my car. But to my surprise, I found teenage Saudis including some schoolchildren doing the job adeptly, efficiently and at a remarkably cheap price,” he said. At first he thought the Saudi children might be working in the fish market because of coming from a poor families or that they might be school dropouts. However, it turned out that the Saudi children, aged between 10 and 17, were regular students making money during the summer vacation, he said. “The million riyal question that came to my mind was why were these Saudi children working in the fish market. Was it because they were poor and needed the money to support their parents?” But the frank reply from the children was: “Do you want us to sit idly at home doing nothing?” The children demonstrated an excellent work ethic, a rarity these days, Dr. Elabdelwahab said. The story of these schoolchildren should be include as a lesson in textbooks so that other students can emulate and develop similar work ethics, he said. Dr. Elabdelwahab urged Saudi authorities and companies to promote “school-to-work ethics” behavior among Saudi children. He said other reasons for the problems faced by young Saudi job seekers might be their inability to tolerate the dictates of their managers and the domineering attitude of their bosses or even colleagues, he said. The first job a young Saudi gets may have an irritating experience largely because of lack of work ethics, he said. “This might be the reason why there has been an unemployment problem in the Saudi job market.” He said that performing daily household chores both indoors and outdoors such as purchasing groceries or walking back and forth from school would train young Saudis to become disciplined job seekers.
