By Ramesh Mathew
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As air-conditioner (AC) maintenance workshops gear up to cope with the summer rush, many of them are reported to be struggling to source trained technicians from traditional labour exporting countries, according to sources.
This, according to workers, is due to the fact that only a few of them are willing to return to their employers after the first two years of their contract. Also, AC workshops as well as service centres of major electronics and home appliances companies across Qatar have reportedly been facing “severe problems” in recruiting qualified technicians for the past few years, according to the sources.
The companies, it is understood, are unable to retain their technicians after their initial contract period as the prevailing salary levels are considered low by many workers. Also, many of these AC technicians, who arrive on what is commonly referred to as “free visa”, start working on their own and become operators of their own units after the first year itself. Most of these people are from a South Asian country, it is found.
“There is a large volume of work to handle but only very few are showing interest in remaining with their employers after the first two years,” said a workshop operator in Najma.
A technician who runs his own establishment on Industrial Area claims that the industry is in general facing a shortage of technicians familiar with the operations of centralised AC systems in the region.
It has also been found that many of the trained AC technicians are happy with the work environment in their home countries and only a few are willing to come to this region nowadays. “Last year, our managers spent more than 10 days in India and Sri Lanka to recruit qualified AC technicians, but they could not get enough trained personnel,” said an official of an electronics company, noting that things have remained “more or less the same” for the past five years. This year, the company has tied up with a training centre in an Indian state for new recruits.
The operator of another outlet points out that even helpers, who are without any previous experience and mostly recruited from the Asian countries, are not staying back these days after their initial contract,
Meanwhile, with summer not far away, AC repairing and servicing workshops are slowly resuming operations.
Most of the workshops that remained closed in the past two-three months are small units that generally focus on the repair and maintenance of ACs in residential buildings. On the other hand, companies having annual contracts with major establishments and institutions continued to operate in this period, mainly with a skeletal workforce.
The next few months are considered the best period of the year for most workshops as the temperature rises, resulting in the prolonged and intensive use of ACs.
“Orders for maintenance work from our regular customers have started coming in and we have some work to handle every day,” said Tushar, a technician operator at a shop in Doha.