{"id":6953,"date":"2011-05-15T19:02:12","date_gmt":"2011-05-15T15:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/?p=6953"},"modified":"2011-07-16T11:56:54","modified_gmt":"2011-07-16T07:56:54","slug":"facebook-the-medium-of-choice-for-saudi-gripes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/technology-in-the-middle-east\/facebook-the-medium-of-choice-for-saudi-gripes\/","title":{"rendered":"Facebook: The Medium of Choice for Saudi Gripes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Both Arab News and Saudi Gazette note that a group of licensed Saudi pilots are taking to the pages of Facebook to lament their lack of jobs.<\/p>\n

Over 700 of them, in fact.<\/p>\n

Most are complaining about a change in requirements for jobs at Saudi Arabian Airlines (Saudia). I don\u2019t understand why the airline made these changes. Some of them\u2014like a maximum age of 27\u2014seem harsh. Others, like a decent level of English, the international language for pilots and control towers, seem like common sense. Whether an expensive exam run by the German Space Agency is reasonable, I\u2019ll leave to the experts.<\/p>\n

There seem to be several things going on here. First, there are too many people with pilot qualifications for the jobs available. This is a brutal fact that\u2019s appearing across the globe as an \u2018eduction bubble\u2019 has risen to the surface and is beginning to pop.<\/p>\n

Higher education and specialized education programs are useful in themselves to some extent. But their true utility lies in how well they prepare people for the workplace. Here, there\u2019s massive failure. The fact is, paper qualifications, whether a degree or license, do not guarantee jobs. No one, outside of state-created bureaucracies, hires solely on the basis of education. There\u2019s always something more that\u2019s required. Then there\u2019s the point that universities and technical schools turn out more graduates than there are jobs.<\/p>\n

When I was in Damascus, it was noted that Syrian universities were producing more PhDs in Refrigeration Engineering, annually, than there were jobs in the entire world. My university, Georgetown, shut down its doctoral program in Astronomy back in the early 70s because it was producing more PhDs than there were jobs available to them.<\/p>\n

To a greater or lesser extent\u2014mostly greater\u2014universities and schools are bureaucratically hide-bound. They do not change gears or directions quickly. Not only do they have faculty (whose degrees may be two or three decades old) in tenured positions, thus hard to get rid of, but the structures of various departments tend toward stasis. They know what they know, don\u2019t really want to learn new things, and certainly don\u2019t want to be told their hard-earned (and expensive) wisdom is no longer useful.<\/p>\n

Private institutions, among which are the majority of flight schools, might be quicker to change. But they are not necessarily geared toward the specific requirements of every single airline. It falls on the student to ensure that the education he\u2019s paying for is going to achieve his own goals. Private schools are geared toward making a profit. They will happily\u2014and correctly\u2014go for the lowest common denominator when it comes to requirements unless they see some advantage to tuning their programs to meet very specific student needs.<\/p>\n

The Saudia training program is, of course, geared toward the needs of Saudia, a quasi-governmental airline. The training folks, though, are not the final policy decision-makers. They teach what they\u2019re told to teach. If requirements change, they\u2019ll change, but they won\u2019t be ahead of those policy changes. And for some reason (well, actually, 9\/11) Saudi pilots have an additional hurdle to surmount when it comes to being hired internationally, no matter how well qualified. To my knowledge, none of the pilots on 9\/11 were Saudis, but the majority of the terrorists taking part in that atrocity were. The would-be pilots can thank Al-Qaeda for that impediment to employment.<\/p>\n

It is interesting, though, that these men are taking to the social networks to air their gripes. As Saudi Arabia prohibits public demonstrations, they\u2019re precluded from doing that. As they\u2019re spread around the vast country, there\u2019s little likelihood of their bumping into each other and gathering, even in private. Facebook, though, provides a venue otherwise lacking in the Kingdom, even if virtual. We\u2019ve seen that social media can play a role in effecting change in Egypt and Tunisia. Whether it will result in the creation of jobs for an oversupply of pilots, though\u2026 I doubt it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CROSSROADS ARABIA: It’s fingers on the keyboard rather than ‘feet on the street’ that are exercised by Saudis fed up with their lot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":6954,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[154,10,63,9],"tags":[3615,169,703,18300,39,6987,18275,509,3882,143,2033,18322],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6953"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6953"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6953\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6954"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6953"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6953"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mideastposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6953"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}