Hommaid Al Shemmari is a man with an ambitious mission - and the vision to fulfil it. As if turning the United Arab Emirates into a world centre of aerospace technology excellence is not job enough, the executive director for business development at Mubadala aerospace is clear that, to get there, he must build the UAE into a world-class centre of excellence in education.
Al Shemmari would regard it as a failure to rely on the typical developing country route of sending large numbers of university students abroad for education, and then bringing them back home to staff domestic industry.
That approach is expensive and makes life difficult, culturally, for students while they are abroad and then again when they return home, possibly to feel like strangers in their own country. So, he wants the UAE's industry leaders of tomorrow to be educated at home.
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But at present, he laments, the UAE's educational system is locally focused, so while a UAE university degree translates into a job in the UAE it is not of international standard.
Al Shemmari's dream is to pull the UAE's universities up to world standard by 2012 or 2013.
To lift educational standards, Al Shemmari will employ the same strategy that is building Mubadala aerospace's competence in civil and military maintenance and composites engineering: co-operation with customers and even rivals worldwide. In the educational arena, that means establishing co-degree programmes with major universities in North America and Europe.
Ultimately, Al Shemmari's dream is that young people graduating as engineers in the UAE can get jobs abroad with the likes of Airbus or Boeing for a couple years before coming back home: "If I cannot achieve that, we have failed."
Source: Flight Daily News
