Programme Overview
Tashgheel — Arabic for employment — is Oman’s national programme for increasing Omani nationals’ participation in private sector employment. It operates under the Ministry of Labour and works in coordination with the National Centre for Employment (NCE), the Human Resources Development Fund, and private sector employer bodies.
The programme exists because the central challenge of Oman’s labour market — the gap between the 40% Omanisation target for private sector employment and the approximately 18.5% current reality — cannot be solved by regulation alone. Tashgheel attempts to address the demand-side, supply-side, and matching failures simultaneously.
Key Mechanisms
Job seeker registration and profiling: The programme maintains a registry of unemployed and underemployed Omani nationals, with skills assessments and career interest profiles. This database underpins both direct placement efforts and aggregate workforce planning.
Employer incentive schemes: Oman has historically used both mandatory Omanisation quotas (by sector) and positive incentive schemes (subsidised wages, social insurance contributions, training grants) to encourage private sector hiring of Omanis. Tashgheel administers the incentive programmes.
Training and upskilling: Short-course training programmes targeted at skills that private sector employers have identified as in shortage — including technical skills in engineering, IT, and healthcare, as well as soft skills and professional certification programmes.
Vocational pathways: Development of vocational and technical education pathways that align with private sector skill demands, reducing the skills mismatch that causes qualified Omani graduates to be passed over for expatriate workers with more directly applicable technical training.
Entrepreneurship support: For Omanis who are not suited to employment, Tashgheel provides pathways into self-employment and small business development — including access to the Al Rafd Fund for small business financing.
The Tawteen Integration
The 2024 launch of the Tawteen platform represents the most significant recent evolution of Oman’s employment programme architecture. Tawteen is a digital job-matching platform that directly connects Omani job seekers with private sector vacancies — replacing manual, bureaucratic matching processes with an algorithmic, digital system.
The platform integrates job seeker profiles, employer vacancy listings, and skills assessment tools. Its effectiveness in closing the Omanisation gap will be one of the most important indicators of whether digital infrastructure can shift labour market outcomes that decades of regulatory pressure have not.
Results and Challenges
Progress: The Omani private sector employment share has risen from 11.6% (2016 baseline) to approximately 18.5% (2024). This represents genuine progress — over 90,000 additional Omani jobs in the private sector — but is well behind the trajectory required to reach 35% by 2030 and 40% by 2040.
Expatriate cost differential: The fundamental challenge is structural: expatriate workers from South Asia accept wages and working conditions that make them significantly cheaper than Omani nationals for most private sector employers. Without either closing this cost differential or creating roles where Omanis have a comparative advantage, Omanisation targets face a ceiling effect.
Skills mismatch persistence: Despite training investments, the mismatch between Omani graduate skills and private sector requirements persists. This reflects deeper issues in educational quality and curriculum relevance that Tashgheel alone cannot solve.
Government employment preference: Cultural preference for government employment — which offers job security, defined hours, and social status — remains strong. Changing this preference requires both private sector improvements in compensation and working conditions, and a gradual cultural shift as private sector careers become more visible success pathways.
Structural Context
Tashgheel operates within a difficult structural environment: a young and growing Omani population requiring approximately 30,000-40,000 new private sector jobs per year, an economy historically dominated by a relatively small government and state-owned enterprise sector, and a private sector accustomed to cheap expatriate labour.
Vision 2040 addresses the structural side through economic diversification — creating new private sector sectors (green hydrogen, digital economy, advanced manufacturing) where Omani nationals can develop competitive skills. Tashgheel’s effectiveness is ultimately dependent on whether these new sectors materialise at sufficient scale and speed.