CHALLENGE

The challenges being addressed include:
- Enhance awareness about jobs in tourism
- Increase the number of jobs in the hospitality industry
- Increase of percentage for Saudi’s entering the hospitality industry

INITIATIVE

In 2022, the Ministry of Tourism launched ‘Tourism Trailblazers’, an initiative aimed to provide 100,000 young Saudis with the necessary hospitality skills to pursue professions in the tourism industry. The programme entails a USD 100 million investment.

In collaboration with the top global hospitality institutes, the Ministry of Tourism launched a tailored qualification programme in 2022 lead by a local university in Saudi Arabia targeting job seekers and upskilling of workers in the tourism sector to help them acquire the necessary professional skills, by enrolling them in courses abroad to fulfill the labor market demand for hospitality workforce across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Three pathways have been developed:

1) an entry level pathway to define hospitality industry,

2) technical pathway to define theory and practice in hospitality industry and

3) managerial level pathway to define principles and practices in tourism and hospitality industry.

As the number of applicants exceeded 65 thousand since the launch of the programme, three interview centers were created in Riyadh, Jeddah & Dammam to validate the documents and process the applications. The logistics and securing flights to accommodate the trainees on a weekly basis from Dammam, Riyadh & Jeddah to travel to the training institutes internationally in Marbella, Geneva, Paris, London and Glasgow was a challenge. Therefore, the local partner university, through its agreements with visa processing agencies and travel agencies in the Kingdom, secured the number of seats required to accommodate the trainees on the weekly flights.

IMPACT

By 25th December 2022, the Tourism Trailblazer programme had trained 10,011 trainees in total. Today, the Ministry of Tourism is preparing to launch the Tourism Trailblazer programme 2.0 in continuous support to the hospitality industry in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Outcomes and impact:
• Enhanced awareness about jobs in tourism sector
• An increase in the number of jobs in the hospitality industry: from 762,960 in December 2021 to 880,140 in December 2022
• Increase in the percentage of Saudis entering the hospitality industry: from 33.2% in December 2021 to 36.6% in December 2022