Chapter 6: Workforce Education and Development in the Middle East

This chapter examines workforce development primarily in the Arab Gulf states including Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with a particular emphasis on the UAE. These six countries, which also constitute an economic group called the Arab Gulf Cooperation Countries, have been shaped by their shared history, Islamic religion, and Arabic culture and language, as well as their unique geographic location and access to oil resources as a major source of wealth. The Middle East generally encompasses a larger region that includes Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Iran, Turkey, and Yemen. Because of the diversity of economic, political, social-cultural, religious, and educational factors in these countries, it would be difficult to generalize across all of them or to describe differences in enough detail to be useful. Therefore, I focus on an area of the Middle East that has much in common, particularly in the area of workforce development issues and trends over the past 30 years. Because of my direct experiences working with the vocational education system of the UAE for many years, this country is used as an example of workforce development factors and systems that can be found, to some degree, in most of the Arab Gulf oil rich countries.