based company is working with King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran and high schools across Saudi Arabia to find talented students who will join its project teams in Kingdom. Its personnel will help to train young Saudi engineers to work under Saudi Aramco's exacting standards. Erdoni said the company hopes to have 45 Saudi engineers joining its ranks in the coming months. "We will include as many Saudi engineers as we can on our team," Erdoni said. Satoshi Sato, project manager for the Japanese-based engineering firm JGC, noted that Saudi-based Radicon Gulf Construction was working on 11 of the 18 buildings in its portion of the Hawiyah project. Sato said JGC was hiring Saudis for its home-office engineering department and that all the later construction drawings would be done in Saudi Arabia. JGC is working with 10 Saudi suppliers in its materials procurement. The company also is working with Saudi Aramco to help local suppliers take on complicated projects that otherwise might be beyond their experience. JGC expects to have 4,900 men working on its part of construction in the Hawiyah project at its peak with an estimated 16.8 million man-hours involved. Additionally, JGC is starting a training school to qualify Saudis for good-paying jobs in the construction trades. Sato said that the Saudi Aramco project managers assisting JGC in Japan are an integral part of the JGC team, and employees of the two companies often take part in trips and other recreational activities together. I. Uchida, CEO of Yokogawa - one of the world's leading process control companies - used the event to announce the company's plan to open a process control office later this year in Alkhobar in the Eastern Province. "Initially, it will have 30 employees," Uchida said. "Eventually, we hope to create 100 jobs."
