Oman trained 11,000 people and reached 69% national IT staffing

Oman's Makeen programme has trained more than 11,000 Omanis in digital skills, and Omanisation in technical IT roles now stands at 69%. The country's 2026–2030 digital economy roadmap targets the digital economy reaching 10% of GDP, alongside a national AI platform and a set of digital centres. The 69% figure is the one to focus on, because localisation rates in technical roles are among the hardest numbers in Gulf workforce policy to move. Every Gulf state has nationalisation targets, and most report progress. Progress tends to come first in roles with shorter training paths: administration, management, customer-facing positions, compliance. Technical roles take longer because they require a pipeline rather than a target. Senior engineers cannot be produced on a policy timetable. A country needs computer science graduates in volume, junior positions for them to occupy, mid-level engineers to supervise them, and enough years for the first cohort to become the third. That is a decade and a half of continuous investment. Seven in ten is high enough to indicate that pipeline is running rather than that the roles are newly labelled, which is what makes it a capability figure rather than a headcount one. It shows up in the capability scores. Oman scored 47 out of 100 for digital readiness in the 2026 International Digital Competitiveness Assessment, alongside Saudi Arabia on 44, Qatar on 42, Kuwait on 41 and Bahrain on 35, and climbed 16 places into the top 25 fastest-improving countries. Oman is not outspending any of them. What readiness indices measure is capability and adoption rather than expenditure — whether services run end to end, whether skills exist domestically, whether a state can operate what it buys. A national technical workforce is exactly what that measures, and it is exactly what Oman has been building. Ten percent of GDP from the digital economy by 2030 is an ambitious target for an economy of Oman's size and hydrocarbon weighting. It implies growth well beyond what a training programme alone produces, and the roadmap pairs the training with a national AI platform and digital centres for that reason. The sequencing is the distinctive part. Oman built the workforce first and is now building infrastructure for it to run, where larger neighbours have been able to run both programmes at once at far greater scale. Which order produces more over a decade will be visible in about five years.