ADDRESSING MISMATCH BETWEEN TVET PROGRAMS AND THE SKILL NEEDS IN HYDROCARBON & ENERGY SECTOR – A CASE STUDY FROM QATAR

Abstract

Low levels of engagement between industrial and educational institutions continues to prevent course improvement and development of industry-relevant curricula. Linkages between Qatar’s industry and post-secondary education are weak and often give rise to neglected or duplicated human capital development. Therefore, most development efforts of human capital occur in isolation involving archaic programs with many Faculty complacent and unaware of new technologies and developments in relevant industrial sectors. A survey on “Improving and enriching the Human Capital of the State of Qatar through Identification and Development of 21st Century Skills”, explored perceptions of both employers and Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) program leaders toward the skills needed for economic and social developments in a changing world by Meeting Human Capital Needs through 21st Century Skills. A total of 85 managers and professionals completed the survey, together with 35 TVET program leaders located in one university and five government TVET institutions (the survey was adapted to fit the context of TVET institutions). Thirty-two industry managers and professionals were from Hydrocarbon and Energy, 26 from Built & Environment and 27 from Banking & Finance sectors. Furthermore, 32 semi-structured interviews were conducted.Analysis of collected data, utilized SPSS software for determining descriptive statistics and used T-test and effect size for comparison. Results showed a major mismatch between the perception of TVET program leaders and hydrocarbon industry managers and professionals in many aspects. Impacts such as problems in developing employers (ES = 0.57); using renewal energy (ES 0.8); importance of employers’ generic technological skills (ES = 0.79); importance of personal and social skills –communication (ES=0.99); degree of higher order critical thinking and problem solving (ES= 0.65); cyber security issue (ES=0.65) and many other aspects. The major difference is in attracting women to TVET education (ES=1.6, p, significance=0.00 and Chi square 35.13). While employers have little problems in employing women, TVET institutions have little success in attracting female students. However, there was agreement on the importance of many aspects with very small ES values (0.0-0.2), for example the impact of robotics, artificial intelligence, use of big data, and the shift to a knowledge-based economy. Mismatches appeared to be mainly with certain cognitive and social skills, while the other major issue was poor collaboration between industry and TVET institutions (with only 11% of TVET respondents indicating that such collaboration exists). Minimizing skills’ mismatches can be achieved by placing greater emphasis on reforming Qatar TVET institutions curricula, which will facilitate faster transitions into the workplace. This work illustrates the skills needed in the short, medium and long term, and how the TVET sector can respond to these needs