In recognition of the changing nature of job and future skills, the Government of Bahrain sought inspiration from various global models of how to bring education providers and employers closer together. In 2021-2023 Etio (formerly Tribal Education Services) led the design of the agency and the pilot of sector skills studies across two sectors.
Ensuring the graduates from the education sector have the skills needed by the labour market is a global challenge. In the GCC, youth unemployment and labour market productivity indicators have spurred Governments to look at ways to address this gap and ensure the national investment in education is more closely aligned to the human capital requirements to support national ambitions.
There are various models to address this gap globally. Etio worked with the Bahrain Government to design a national skills agency whose role it would be to engage employers and more closely match skills anticipation with skills supply from education. Skills Bahrain was designed to be a agent of change in the Kingdom to help ‘translate’ the skills conversation from employers to education providers.
As a trusted partner, Etio worked with a local team to design the governance model, operating model, human resource requirements and products and services of the new agency. Through extensive stakeholder consultation and engagement the structure of the new agency involved engaging both the labour market and the education & training sector.
To showcase the possibilities of this new agency, Etio led the development of two sector skills strategies and workforce development plans. Focusing on the Financial Services and Telecommunication sectors, Skills Bahrain worked with industry leaders and representatives groups to undertake three sector wide surveys. One survey to line managers in the sector, one to the Human Resource professionals in the sector and one for all employees in the sector.
The surveys were complimented by focus groups and workshops with both the sectors and education and training providers. Drawing on global inspiration, and sector skills and behaviour framework formed the basis of the core requirements for those working in the sectors. These were used to help define career pathways and occupational profiles that provides education information on specific skills to include in curriculum and assessment to more closely align graduates with jobs in the sectors.
The sector skills studies highlight areas of strengths and weakness and the rapid changes to the sectors brought about by automation that required new skills. Based on this workforce development plans focused on upskilling and reskilling to ensure new core skills, such as data analytics, would be central to all education and training programmes that serve the sectors.
The concepts introduced through the establishment of Skills Bahrain made national impact with the recognition of areas of policy and legislative change needed to better support a skills focused education system. The required changes were initiated by this project are now in ongoing national dialogue with implementing agencies.
Etio's role included working closely with the local team to ensure knowledge transfer and sustainability in their understanding of this new systems approach to skills development. The outcome of Etio's pilot was a significant increase in understanding and capacity across the applied learning and skills system as to how employer data can be collected, synthesised and used to enhance skills development in education and training.
Through Etio's extensive international network, leaders in the field of apprenticeships, sector skills councils, skills research, sector specific skill specialisations and work-based learning specialists all contributed to different parts of the project providing a wide perspective of expertise from across the system. This exposure for the local team within Skills Bahrain and across wider stakeholders was a major contributor to a system-wide understanding and progression towards a more integrated education and labour market.