Oman Wants 30,000 AI Jobs by 2030, and the Reskilling Plan Runs Through Every Governorate

Oman Wants 30,000 AI Jobs by 2030, and the Reskilling Plan Runs Through Every Governorate

Oman has been one of the quieter Gulf players on AI policy, which is why the workforce numbers inside its latest plan are worth paying attention to. The National AI Programme targets 30,000 AI-specialised jobs by 2030 and an expected $5 billion economic impact. Sitting above that is the Eleventh Five-Year Development Plan (2026-2030), which commits to creating 700,000 total jobs, of which 301,000 are earmarked for Omanis. The reskilling side of that plan, run under the Makeen initiative, is how the Sultanate intends to get there.

Omanisation and AI are now the same conversation

Omani technical workforces have historically been heavier on expatriate hiring than some of the country's neighbours. That is shifting. Omanisation in IT roles has reached 69% in technical positions, with Omanis representing 45.5% of the total IT workforce. In 2025 alone, the IT sector employed 1,289 Omani nationals across 33 specialised professions. The Ministry of Labour has built AI and data-science roles directly into the Omanisation categories used to monitor private-sector hiring.

[The programme is] a comprehensive framework designed to foster a knowledge-based economy through advanced technology and innovation.

That framing matters for recruitment strategy. Private-sector employers bidding on government contracts now need credible AI hiring pipelines to Omani nationals, not just headcount targets. That is a significantly stiffer bar than the country used five years ago.

Makeen is the single most important training programme

Makeen is the training arm that matters. Since the start of the National Digital Economy Programme in 2021, Makeen has trained more than 11,000 Omanis in digital skills. The 2026-2030 phase is expected to accelerate into AI, cybersecurity, and cloud computing, although exact numeric targets have not yet been published. Every Omani hiring manager paying attention should be tracking the forthcoming Makeen curriculum updates closely. They shape who is available in the market for entry-level AI roles.

The geographic dimension matters too. Oman plans to establish digital transformation centres in all 11 governorates. That deliberately pushes training and AI job creation beyond Muscat. A centre in Dhofar focuses on agriculture and tourism technology. Another in Al Batinah emphasises fisheries and logistics digitisation. This is the kind of regional distribution plan that the UAE and Saudi Arabia have partly struggled to execute.

His Majesty's forward-looking vision is to build a balanced and competitive economy powered by Omani talent.

Ma'een is the sovereign language anchor

On the model side, Oman's RO 79 million investment in AI has produced roughly 22 specialised AI companies domestically. The flagship is Ma'een, described in government briefings as the first advanced national language model in Oman. It is trained on local data to support Arabic language processing and government decision-making. That is a technically important step, because it gives Omani employers and ministries a sovereign option when building AI copilots and agents for government workflows.

Ma'een sits alongside Saudi Arabia's ALLaM, the UAE's Falcon and Jais, Qatar's Fanar, and Egypt's Karnak, rounding out the MENA sovereign language model map. For reference, the most recent comparative benchmarks are covered in our Arabic LLM scoreboard and the latest dialect benchmark notes.

How AI is changing what Omani employers look for

Three shifts are visible inside Omani hiring data and corporate training budgets:

1. Junior roles now require prompt engineering, data literacy, and Arabic-English bilingual comfort as minimum entry criteria
2. Mid-career IT professionals are being routed into Makeen-aligned AI reskilling tracks before promotion
3. Government tenders increasingly ask for bidder evidence of Omani AI-specialist headcount, not just total Omanisation ratios

For regional HR leaders, that mirrors the Gulf-wide HR AI playbook now emerging. The Omani version is distinctive because of the governorate-level distribution mandate, which few Gulf countries have been willing to adopt at that granularity.

Risks and execution questions

The most obvious risk is absorption. Creating 30,000 AI-specialised roles over four years requires both credible employers and credible graduates. If Omani graduates train into AI but can only find conventional IT jobs, the policy under-delivers. The second risk is private-sector quality control. Rapid Omanisation in technical roles can produce headline compliance without real skills depth unless training pipelines and employer standards move together. The third is compute access. Oman's cloud and GPU footprint remains smaller than the UAE's and Saudi Arabia's, which limits the hands-on experience available to Omani juniors.

The upside is that the plan is unusually coherent. Saudi Arabia's Year of AI and the UAE's Stanford-index moment are national-brand stories. Oman's plan is more quietly structured around a budget, a training programme, and a distributed geographic model that spreads opportunity beyond the capital.