Education is central to the Kingdom’s development agenda as nowhere else in the world. As the world’s 8th highest education spender, Saudi Arabia is investing heavily in education and training programs to furnish investors with a workforce capable of world leadership in a knowledge-based economy. Meanwhile, the Kingdom matches its robust investment in skills with one of the world’s most pro-business regulatory frameworks: the World Economic Forum rates Saudi Arabia’s labor market as the 7th freest in the world.1
In addition to the Kingdom’s skilled local workforce, Saudi Arabia has long welcomed an abundance of foreign workers to the country, including both highly skilled professionals and low-cost labor. With the Kingdom’s expansive, well established infrastructure for accommodating expatriate workers of all kinds, companies based in Saudi Arabia are able to easily draw upon talent from around the region and the world. With a 0% individual income tax, the Kingdom offers exceptional economics for employers, as well as attractive incentives for industrious opportunity-seekers.
Saudi Arabia is more committed than ever to supplying world-class talent for today’s commercial projects. Through CADRE, an innovative human resources institution launched by His Majesty King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia provides a recruiting engine to match investors with the right people, both Saudi and foreign, to meet the most rigorous targets. Charged with planning and implementing a comprehensive human capital strategy for Saudi Arabia’s Economic Cities and beyond, CADRE is equipping Saudis with the specific skill sets to set the Economic Cities in motion. Its work draws from curricular standards set in the world’s leading economies, and takes a customer-centric approach that provides tailor-made human capital solutions to investors in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia has seen significant recent success in its education strategy. An increase in school funding, coupled with school building and teacher recruitment programs, has led to an increase in literacy rates from 33% in 1970 to 83% today. Saudi Arabia has also strongly improved its enrollment rates at the secondary and tertiary levels. In addition, the number of women in tertiary education now outweighs the number of men. Still more is being done. In 2007, the King Abdullah Project for the Development of Public Education was announced. This project will distribute SAR 12 billion over the next five years as part of a new education strategy covering four areas: improvement to the public education environment, teacher training, curriculum development, and extracurricular activities.
Activity is not limited to primary and secondary education. The establishment of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), a research institution expected to be completed in 2009, with capacity for 13,000 students, will help ensure that Saudi Arabia can train and retain the next generation of scientists and engineers. KAUST and other teaching and research institutions will thus play a crucial role in the Kingdom’s future competitiveness, and their success is anticipated to yield long-term, significant improvements in Saudi Arabia’s ability to furnish companies with a high-quality skilled labor force.
1 World Economic Forum, Global Competitiveness Report 2007-2008.