Saudi women graduates outnumber men in job-training programmes

Tamheer project among those proving popular with females in the kingdom

Saudi Arabia’s government has introduced a number of training schemes and reforms to boost women's rights and job prospects. AFP

Female Saudi graduates have significantly outnumbered Saudi men in the national on-the-job training programme launched by the Human Resources Development Fund (Hadaf).

Hadaf said 74 per cent of 61,000 participants – who have benefited from Tamheer, a three to six-month on-the-job training scheme for Saudi graduates, since its launch in 2017 – were female.

Most of the participants were from Makkah, Riyadh and the Eastern Province.

The number of women with jobs in Saudi Arabia has nearly doubled in the last five years and now stands at more than 35 per cent of the workforce.

Hadaf offers programmes through the national labour portal to train Saudi graduates in association with Nitaqat – the Saudisation scheme – one of the most important pillars of the Saudi Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development’s (MHRSD) strategic transformation initiative.

Nitaqat, launched in 2011, aims to increase the number of Saudis employed, including women across all sectors. The initiative introduced the standard monthly minimum wage of SR4,000 ($1,066) last year.

The Saudi Press Agency reported last year that Hadaf offers professional certificates for graduates wishing to train in new areas including cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, technical information security, information and communication technology, and risk management.

Abdullah Abuthnain, the Saudi Deputy Minister of Human Resources and Social Development, said that the number of women in work was at "the highest level in the kingdom’s history" as the government seeks to introduce reforms and boost women's rights.