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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.
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.
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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.
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At I/O 2026, Sundar Pichai Concedes AI Must Deliver Real Value
Gemini 3.5, a personal agent called Spark, agentic shopping, and Android XR eyewear are all aimed at making AI feel useful, not just impressive.
Google’s annual I/O developer conference (I/O 2026) has recently become a status update on the same question: can the company turn its AI spending into products people use every day? This year, chief executive Sundar Pichai described Google as being in a phase of hyper progress, while conceding this is the part of the cycle where people want to see real value in the products they use on a day-to-day basis.
The strategy on display was to push agents — AI systems that act on a user’s behalf — into nearly every Google product at once. Search now has an “intelligent search box” that returns generated explainer videos alongside links. Gmail, Docs, YouTube and Maps are gaining their own agent layers, including a Docs Live feature that turns spoken instructions into drafted text with citations.
Two new models, Gemini 3.5 and a cheaper Gemini 3.5 Flash, arrived the same day. Google says 900 million people now use Gemini, and that more than 50 billion images have been generated with it. The pricing tier names are likely to confuse buyers: a new AI Ultra plan launches at $100 a month, while the older Gemini AI Ultra drops from $250 to $200.
The flashier announcements were Gemini Omni, a video generator pitched as a more realistic answer to OpenAI’s discontinued Sora 2, and Gemini Spark, a personal agent that handles recurring tasks across a user’s Google account. A new universal shopping cart lets agents complete purchases across multiple retailers from inside Google itself, placing the company between the merchant and the buyer, and also owning the checkout.
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Google also confirmed its Android XR eyewear, built with Samsung and frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Audio-only glasses ship this autumn; a display-equipped version, which would superimpose live translations into the wearer’s field of view, is still in development. Both sets translate, however only the display version shows you the result.
What Pichai did not resolve is the bargain underneath all this. An agent is only useful to the degree it knows your calendar, your inbox, your shopping history and your physical surroundings. Google has now confirmed that, in time, the same context may carry advertising.
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