AMMAN, Jan. 23 (Xinhua) -- After graduating from a private college in 2021, Osama Dheeb spent months to find a job related to his major of history in Jordan but failed.
Over the past years, Dheeb had changed several jobs, but none of them was satisfactory. In November 2023, he decided to attend courses at a vocational training center in Zarqa, a city located north of Jordanian capital Amman, to learn how to fix electronic and mobile devices.
"Now I'm learning new skills that are needed in the labor market. I hope I can find a job after I finish the year-long program," the 25-year-old resident of the namesake governorate said in an interview on Monday.
The Zarqa center is one of the 35 such institutes affiliated to the state-run Vocational Training Corporation, which provides popular vocational training courses to prepare young Jordanians for in-demand jobs.
According to the corporation, 4,968 people with a high school diploma and 3,521 people with a university degree attended its courses in the academic year 2023-2024.
"There is an increase in the number of trainees with academic certificates in this academic year, which underscores the vital role of the corporation in guiding youth and promoting the awareness of technical and vocational work to keep pace with the changes in the local and global job market," Jameel Al Qadi, the corporation's spokesperson, was quoted by the state-run Petra News Agency as saying last week.
With its training centers scattered in the 12 governorates of Jordan, the corporation aims to help create jobs, he said.
Commenting on the vocational training program, Mohammad Sheekh, an economic analyst at the Amman-based Waai Center for Strategic Studies, said "this is a step in the right direction" that will contribute in lowering the unemployment rate.
Young Jordanians prefer to attend universities and pursue careers that are related to their majors in college, however, there are not enough jobs for university graduates over the past years as their number is on the rise, he said.
Most of them must accept professions that might not be related to their fields of study, he said, adding vocational training is one of the solutions to the issue.
The unemployment rate in Jordan in the third quarter of 2023 reached 22.3 percent, slightly down from the 23.1 percent recorded in the same period in 2022, according to figures released by Jordan's Department of Statistics.
