Online learning: Saudi travel group Al Tayyar launches e-commerce training programme for young Arabs

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Travel and transport group Al Tayyar has launched a new training programme aimed at providing young Arabs with the skills required to work in e-commerce, the company said on Monday.

The six-month training programme, Jadarah (an Arabic word that means merit), will be opened to Arab youth from any nationality provided that they are resident in the United Arab Emirates, where the training will take place, Muhammad Chbib, the head of Al Tayyar’s Strategic Online Business Unit said at a media roundtable event.

The candidates could be fresh graduates or have less than three year work experience. Candidates need to have graduated with a Grade Point Average (GPA) of at least 3.5 percent to be eligible to apply.

Those interested can apply on jadarah.com before June 13.

Chbib said the first intake will offer places to 30 trainees - a number he hopes will increase to between 50-100 in subsequent courses. Trainees will receive a monthly salary of around 5,000 UAE dirhams ($1,361).

The trainers will include Al Tayyar staff and others from several international companies including Google, Twitter, Facebook and travel company Amadeus, according to Chbib.

Students will receive a grounding in several business skills including management and business ethics as well as technology, said Chbib, who also heads Al Tayyar Group’s Tajwal online travel portal.

“Our first goal is to develop them and train them so that they go and have a successful career and build the industry in the region,” Chbib said.

The e-commerce industry is developing at an extremely fast pace internationally and in the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries (GCC) – a region with a young and tech-savvy population.

Consultancy firm A.T. Kearney last year increased its forecast for the size of the e-commerce sector in the GCC to $24 billion in 2020, up from a $20 billion estimate set in 2016.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE), which is currently the top e-commerce market in the region, was expected to have had a market value of $5 billion in 2017, compared to $4 billion in Saudi Arabia, according to A.T. Kearney.

Investment in the ecommerce market is also intensifying. Last year, e-commerce giant Amazon bought UAE’s local e-commerce portal Souq.com and Dubai’s Emaar Malls bought a 51 percent stake in e-commerce fashion website Namshi. Last week, Emaar Malls said in its first quarter results for 2018 that Namshi’s sales were up 21 percent year-on-year, to 176 million UAE dirhams $48 million during the first three months.

“The development (in the e-commerce sector) is huge and it is very hard to cope with,” said Antoine Medawar, Amadeus vice president in the Middle East.

According to Laila Al Omran, the Dubai-based head of Jadarah, there is a clear gap between the requirements of e-commerce operators in the region and the skills being taught by higher education institutes.

“There is a study that shows that universities would take up to seven years to know and understand the industry and what it is doing. And you can imagine how much the technology would have developed in those seven years. So for the education to be able to reflect what is going on in the industry will be hard,” Al Omran said.

The trainees who take part in the course may be offered the chance to work in the company but are also free to join other firms, Chbib said.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia are expected to be among the biggest markets for information technology (IT) spending in the Middle East and Africa this year, according to research released in January by the International Data Cooperation (IDC), which provides research and analysis on the technology industry across the world.

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