ABHA: The unemployment rate in the Kingdom is considered reasonable under international standards, data published by the Department of General Statistics and Information has revealed.

The unemployment level was estimated at 5.9 percent for the first half of 2015, a decrease from the 11.7 percent registered in the first half of 2014.

Strategic planning consultant Nouf Al-Ghamdi said that the Labor Ministry has failed in implementing the Saudization program, adding that the policy has made the Saudis look like non-preferred employees after all “embarrassing” efforts to convince employers to hire them.

Al-Ghamdi said the government is paying large amounts of money and offering visas to private sector installations that hire Saudis, stressing that the solution lies in projects to build capacity through training.

She said that the wholesale, building and manufacturing industries have a greater potential to increase their percentage of Saudization as they depend a lot on labor and generate large numbers of jobs. However, these fields have few Saudis working in them because the education and training sectors do not graduate people who can work in these sectors.

Al-Ghamdi stressed the need to have a unified framework for relevant governmental bodies to provide detailed and accurate information about the labor market and help implement the official policy in that regard as well as the national strategy for employment in the Kingdom.

She believes that the Labor Ministry should redraft the Saudization strategy and insert key modifications to be up to date with the latest data as the installations should be keen on hiring Saudi employees to benefit from their expertise and not just to get the benefits that wouldn’t be available otherwise.

Shoura Council member Abdul Rahman Al-Heijan highlighted the importance of identifying the reasons behind the decline in employing Saudis: “There’s a problem in the statistics and the Labor Ministry has massive challenges, but we can’t deny that there is progress.”

He said that a large number of youths still want other bodies to find them jobs and don’t take the initiative to find employment themselves. He criticized the fact that many people refuse to work in certain sectors.

Al-Heijan added that the centralization of jobs in big cities poses a challenge for employees who have to migrate domestically, calling upon major companies to have branches in different regions.

Asked about the need to have 10 million expatriate workers while more than 400,000 Saudis are unemployed, he said that the problem is not quantitative and has a lot to do with capacity and qualifications. “There is no society without unemployment.”