News

MENA Job Seekers Can Obtain Career Certificates & Scholarships From Google

For job seekers who only speak Arabic, Google has added 5 additional digital skills courses to help them acquire even more digital skills.

Published

3 years ago

August 21, 2021

Joanna Melki

Google

The tech industry has an insatiable appetite for skilled employees, and universities don’t produce nearly enough graduates to meet it. The result is a global talent shortage, which has recently reached a 15-year high, with 69% of employers globally struggling to find employees with the right blend of technical skills and human strengths.

Now, Google is offering to sponsor over 7,000 scholarships for its Career Certificates program in the Middle East and North Africa as part of the Grow Stronger with Google initiative.

The certificates included in the program are aimed at job seekers with no prior IT experience, and their goal is to help them cultivate the skills they need to find employment in the following four major fields: IT support, project management, UX design, and data analytics.

To reach a wide range of participants, several local organizations are helping to distribute the scholarships, including:

Amideast in Lebanon
Dubai International Financial Center (DIFC) and the Higher College of Technology in the UAE
Egyptian Banking Institution (EBI) and the University Center for Career Development (UCCD)
Gaza Sky Geeks in Palestine
General Commission for Audiovisual Media (GCAM) and the Human Resources Development Fund (HRDF) in Saudi Arabia
The Agency for Digital Development (ADD) in Morocco

Google’s certificates can be obtained even without a scholarship through self-paced programs on Coursera.org. It’s then up to individual employers to recognize them.

Also Read: Mastercard Plans To Say Goodbye To Magnetic Stripes In 2024

For job seekers who only speak Arabic, Google has added five additional digital skills courses to Maharat min Google, helping them acquire even more digital skills needed to thrive in today’s digital world.

Google’s initiative is part of the global education trend of placing greater emphasis on practical skills and using modern digital tools to obtain them. This trend reflects the fact that traditional universities have limited capacity and have trouble keeping with the rapidly evolving needs of the tech industry.

News

Orchid Plans To Find Out What’s Wrong With You Before You’re Born

According to CEO Noor Siddiqui, the company isn’t on a mission to make designer babies, but aims to beat genetic odds and relieve suffering.

Published

10 hours ago

May 7, 2024

Nour Nasir

Orchid

Each day, around 400,000 babies are welcomed into the world. However, among those, a growing number will experience some kind of birth defect or inherited disease.

Noor Siddiqui, CEO of Orchid, hopes to “mitigate” unpleasant genetic surprises using genome sequencing technology to reveal a wealth of genetic information on which newborns will grow into healthy adults.

Until 2019, IVF specialists had access to under 1% of the human genome. The tests, called PGT-A and PGT-M, scanned a mere 1,000 data points in a genome comprising around 3 billion bases, offering a very limited dataset compared to the technology used by Orchid.

“Our chromosomes are like chapters in a book that make up the table of contents.” Explained Siddiqui. “[PGT-A and PGT-M tests] only examine the table of contents, whereas what Orchid is doing is like a spellcheck on the entire book.” Orchid’s genome sampling technology assesses “100 times the data, covering many more conditions.” In essence, an Orchid report covers three categories of common genetic issues: monogenic disorders, polygenic conditions, and de-novo mutations.

Also Read: Advancing MENA Health Through AI Vascular Age Analysis

Orchid’s technology raises many questions. Aside from the obvious ethical concerns, data privacy is the most obvious potential issue with the tests. Noor Siddiqui is keen to alleviate any concerns: “No data at Orchid is ever sold to any third parties. Parents are in complete control of their data. If they want to delete the data, we’re happy to delete it off of our servers. If they want to export the data, they can export the data. And if they want us to re-analyze the data, we can re-analyze the data”.

Compared to a lifetime of medical bills, gene therapy, and suffering, Orchid’s genome screening report has the potential to change the future lives of thousands of newborns worldwide.