Companies in Lebanon should cooperate more with universities and schools on advising students about the job market and the majors that are mostly in demand, recruiting agencies said at the NDU Job Fair 2015.
“There is a great mismatch in Lebanon between what the job market needs and the majors that students are specializing in,” said Riwa Akl, recruitment coordinator at Malia Group.
“We receive hundreds of CVs every year and 80 percent of them belong to students graduating from engineering schools, for instance, while every project usually recruits only one or two engineers and not more,” she added. “We end up having an excess number of engineers incapable of finding jobs.”
Akl explained that there is great demand in the job market in other majors such as chemistry, food technology and quality control, adding that students should start diversifying their choices when it comes to university education.
“Some majors such as marketing, for instance, witness a great number of graduates each year but there is still a great demand for this specialization on the contrary to engineering,” she said.
“This is why companies should get more involved with schools and universities in a bid to provide wise orientation to students,” she added.
Likewise, Wassim Mhanna, electrical senior engineer at BAT, a contracting and engineering firm, said that the number of engineering graduates in Lebanon is going up year after year. “The market for engineering graduates has become very saturated,” he said.
Mhanna explained that engineers were very much in demand in 2008 when the real estate sector was booming, but the Syrian crisis has had a great negative impact on the contracting business. “Today you can say that around 60 percent of engineering graduates are leaving the country to the Gulf region,” he said.
“Other engineers are doing a career shift to be able to find a job,” he said.
Mhanna’s comments were echoed by Wissam Khalil, mechanical senior engineer at Impex, a trading and engineering company, who said that the market is a bit saturated when it comes to engineering graduates.
“There is still some demand for skilled engineers, but there is a lot of competition because of the great number of students graduating from engineering schools,” he said.
“Vacant positions can be mostly found when existing engineers decide to travel and work outside Lebanon,” he added.
Khalil explained that engineering graduates tend to work for two or three years in a company in Lebanon before receiving better offers from companies abroad.
Similarly, Elie Mousallem, planning and recruitment supervisor at Byblos Bank, echoed the same view, saying that students should be better oriented before deciding on the area of their specialization.
“There is no proper orientation at universities and students are not very well informed usually about what to expect when they specialize in a certain field,” he said.
“Instructors should give a proper insight to students about the different majors,” he added.
He explained that some students study finance for instance and choose to work in investments or the capital market following their graduation without knowing that the financial market in Lebanon is not as developed as it is in other countries. “Some graduates do not even know the difference between bonds, equity markets and commodities, yet they want to work in finance,” he said.
Mousallem believes that the reason behind this trend is that students cannot always afford to go to prestigious universities so they end up graduating from inexpensive and average colleges and this surely affects their knowledge and their future ability to find good jobs.
“The government is also responsible for the spread of small universities because it is being very flexible in giving licenses to new educational institutions with a low quality of education,” he said.
Labor Minister Sejaan Azzi urged the government to stop offering licenses to new colleges haphazardly, saying it is affecting the level of education in the country while increasing unemployment rate.
“Universities should cooperate with each other to stop the government from giving licenses to new small universities,” he said in a speech at the opening of the job fair.
“These establishments are graduating students that are not qualified enough to find good jobs in the future and this is a disaster,” he added.
Azzi said that unemployment before the flow of Syrian refugees to Lebanon stood at 11 percent but has reached 25 percent following the Syrian crisis.
Azzi said the job fair was a good indication that the private sector is still seeking to expand its base by recruiting highly skilled graduates for its operations. “It also shows how conscious good universities such as NDU are in finding jobs for their students following their graduation,” he said.
Azzi also called for the election of a Lebanese president, saying this would contribute to economic and security stability even if it does not entirely solve existing problems.
Exhibitors interviewed by The Daily Star said their operations were negatively impacted by the economic recession since the outbreak of the Syrian crisis.
Mhanna said that the deteriorating political situation has impacted the launch of new projects in the market. “We are still working on existing projects since 2011,” he said.
He explained that around 10 contracting companies only used to apply for a specific project in the past but nowadays every project receives more than 30 applicants. “Today we do not have a high number of new projects and this is why you find great competition among contracting companies to win the bid for these projects,” he said.
Khalil said clients are reluctant to start project plans due to the complicated political situation.
Similarly, Mousallem said that banks are not expanding or opening new branches like before. “We are not expanding like before, especially in the region,” he said.
He explained that the Central Bank also has put in place regulations specifying the number of branches that open every year.
“Moreover, recruitment in banks was impacted because the slowdown in economic activity does not encourage the opening of new branches,” he said.
By Dana Halawi
