The Saudi labor Market: Challenges Faced by the Unemployed Nationals - Conceptual Framework of the Nitaqat Program – and it is Performance

Abstract

In the past few decades, Saudi has faced a huge rise in the number of unemployed nationals. Moreover, the Saudi labor has a huge foreign manpower especially in the private sector. For this purpose, the Saudi government has introduced Nitaqat program in the private sector to monitor and to decrees the over dependence on the foreigner manpower and to influence the nationals. One important reason of creating Nitaqat program is that to encourage companies to recruit more Saudi workers in order to decrease the number of unemployment among the Saudi population. The purpose of this study is to investigate the Saudi labor market state. The paper examined the barriers of Saudi nationals to be engaged in the private sector, the Saudi’s skills shortages, the government efforts to empower women and the underlying reasons of Saudi companies to prefer to recruit foreign workers over nationals. Saudi governments acted to reduce the number of unemployed citizens and to increases the national manpower. Due to the fact that the governmental efforts in addition to the great opportunities to overcome the unemployment issue among Saudi workers are acknowledged, the unemployment rate for Saudi jobseekers has not been improved.