“Qatar very open-minded about innovation”

As the country’s premier technical college, College of the North Atlantic-Qatar (CNAQ) is imparting career education to thousands of students. Equipping them with right set of skills required to work in different vocations, the college is preparing Qatar’s citizens to find exciting careers in fields such as petrochemical and natural gas companies, government services, and utilities.In its Technician Preparatory Program (TPP), a specialised programme training students in technician disciplines specific to the energy sector, 96 per cent of the students are Qatari nationals and 100 per cent of these students are sponsored by local companies or industry partners of the college.From more than 4,000 students enrolled with it, the college’s School of Business Studies has the largest number followed by Engineering Technology, Information Technology and Health Sciences.Recognising the importance of Vocational Education and Training (VET) in the development of Qatar, specifically in the energy and industry sectors, the college recently instated Professional Chair of Vocational Studies — the first time it has been done in the Middle East and only second in the world.The Chair, Dr Rupert Maclean, has started work at the College to study the specifics of VET in the state, and make recommendations on how to encourage VET growth in Qatar. Community sat him down for an interview about the current status of VET in Qatar and how CNAQ is contributing towards developing Qatar’s skilled workforce.“Qatar over the last few years has made a lot of progress in terms of vocational training. However, there are areas that still need further improvement and development,” says Dr Maclean, sitting in his new office in the sprawling campus of the college that houses 20 buildings with state-of-the-art labs and classrooms.  One of the ways, the professor thinks, the college can assist Qatar is to help it strengthen and upgrade VET through various activities.“And it is not just through educational training but by encouraging a dialogue within the community to expose policy makers and practitioners to new ideas which Qatar may want to consider; some they may reject, others they may embrace,” says the Chair. And the ones that are embraced need to be modified in light of the local situation as no approach is true and relevant to every single country in the same way.VET, says Dr Maclean, has a very important role to play when it comes to the diversification of the economy in Qatar. Internationally, about 80 percent of the work that people do involves technical and vocational skills; and only about 20 percent requires academic skills.“Although academic is very important, often vocational has not gotten the attention that it deserves. And it is so fundamentally important to the economic and social welfare and development of a country,” he explains.Vocational and technical education is also concerned with harnessing new information and communication technologies. It is concerned with the knowledge economy, finance industry, tourism, and with a whole range of industries beyond just oil and gas, he says.And this is the area where CNAQ can contribute a great deal and is willing to contribute and assist the country. The college is demand driven. They are here to serve the needs of Qatar and therefore “we listen very carefully to what it wants and we tailor-make our courses and programmes accordingly.”A majority of students in different programmes and courses in the college are sponsored by partner companies while others also find placements upon completing the courses.Dr Maclean says Qatar is developing rapidly and it is placing itself strategically into other areas apart from oil and gas. So there will be plenty of opportunities for people to actually contribute in a range of occupations.Before coming to CNAQ, Dr Maclean was a professor at a university in Honk Kong, dealing with TVET (Technical VET) and life-long learning and the way in which the TVET can contribute to the development of countries.He was teaching and doing research. Most of his research was with organisations like the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank.Before that, he worked for Unesco for almost 20 years in Bangkok, Myanmar, Paris, and in Bonn, Germany, where he was the foundation director of an international centre of TVET working with 193 countries, including Qatar.“In Bonn, I was mainly concerned with education for employment. But in my other positions I was also concerned with teachers’ education; how to reform teacher education and how to revitalise secondary education because it is sometimes caught between primary and higher,” says Dr Maclean.And in Bangkok, he worked as a Director for Centre for Educational Innovation. One of the things that countries are really interested in, he notes, is how they can innovate their systems. They are looking for cutting-edge developments, to adapt what is happening elsewhere to our own situation and the best practices that can be adopted.“I think Qatar is very open-minded about the innovation. The innovation must be culturally appropriate, and absolutely reasonable. Qatar is willing to look at new ways of doing things that are appropriate to a particular culture and society,” says the newly-instated chair at CNAQ.“I have met people from Qatar at meetings I have organised in different parts of the world and I have always been very impressed by their enthusiasm towards the development of their country,” says Maclean.However, he acknowledges that this region on the whole needs to enhance its research profile.  “When I look at research available from across the world, I don’t find as much in terms of quantity in this region. What I do find is what is available is very good, very high quality,” he elaborates.Research is not just some pure theoretical analysis; it is there to improve policy and practice. When we are doing things that are innovative in Qatar, he believes, we have to research and see whether these things have, in fact, been successful and what adjustments have to be made.“We cannot just be impressionistic in judging these things. So I think this is one area that we are trying to develop further within this college. In one of the things that I have been doing here since my arrival is to improve the research profile,” says Dr Maclean.The challenges in the way include having people with skills who want to do research and having enough trained educated researchers. Also, the Professional Chair stresses that a lot of research has to be indigenous. “We do not just want foreigners coming from outside and then impose their preconceived ideas,” he adds.Among one of the things they are doing at CNAQ to improve the research profile is to apply for Unesco Chair so that intellectual resources of the UN system are mobilised to help Qatar achieve a better research profile.