RIYADH, 24 January 2008 — Among the crowds of business executives who attended the 2nd Global Competitiveness Forum, which concluded in the capital on Tuesday, were certain people with different agendas and views about doing business globally in the 21st century. Saima Sofi, a UK-educated young woman who works as a senior consultant in a private firm, said that the forum was the perfect spot to network. Her mission was to mingle and get to know people who could be potential candidates for clients seeking recruitment in the Kingdom.
Among the primary objectives of her company is to gather a large database of individuals working in different sectors. She said actual opportunities to network was very scarce in the Saudi business community.
“Saudi Arabia is not a market where it is easy to find a pool of talents that you can access because of the difficulty in meeting people to begin with,” she said, adding that very few social engagements allow people to meet others and network.
“Where as in other countries recruitment agencies are the last option to go to, we get requirements from clients for executive positions because they can’t find them ... they do not know where to look.”
She mentioned the scarcity of resources in the Saudi market due to the lack of talent or the lack of work ethics in the community. She also mentioned that human resource data for recruitment was essential in the Kingdom today with so many new companies coming in.
During the forum, she said, she came across many individuals who were very difficult to tap or to communicate to by cross calling or trying to get through contacts she had.
But Sofi, like others who attended many of this year’s GCF sessions, said that the organizers of the event missed out on several main topics that could have been vital to local businessmen who strive for competitiveness, especially relating to the Saudi market.
Very few speakers touched upon topics related to the education level in Saudi Arabia, gender issues, labor issues, as well as methods to apply change in the Saudi community. The ministers who had attended the first day of the forum were more focused on explaining to foreign guests how Saudi society was opening up for investment. But none of them mentioned how that would be applied in reality, nor gave any statistics in labor or market areas.
“What was upsetting was SAGIA (the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority) didn’t have the forward-thinking vision to make it compulsory for the people who set the national curricula to be formally present ... those are the people who are on the ground who can make changes from the ground up,” she said. “Those people were not there.”
One of the points she mentioned was when many speakers were talking about the need for change in the community, yet no local speakers were invited to talk about methods to apply change in the Saudi community.
She mentioned the need to explain to the Saudi and international business community how is it that the Kingdom could be a signatory of the World Trade Organization (WTO) when there was still a monopolization of services here by so-called “sole distributors.”
Another point she mentioned in the forum was how some speakers stressed on the importance of vocational training in the Kingdom, yet no session was organized to speak about the challenges the Kingdom faces in that field.
She believed that next year’s forum should arrange a special session on the Saudi labor market in general. “An accurate case study about the market situation is needed,” she said.
SAGIA, the organizer of the 2nd GCF, intends to have the forum as an annual event in which local and international speakers would be invited to discuss issues related to global economy and competitiveness.
