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Preparing and Educating the Arab Qatari Engineer of 2030 Abstract This paper addresses the issue of adapting Engineering Education to a changing situation in Qatar, a small country that is part of the Arab Gulf Cooperation Council. It presents the framework for a national project planned to take place in the State of Qatar during the 2010/11 academic year. Over the past few years, several professional organizations started reviewing the issue of preparing engineers for the future. Examples of these are: "The Engineer of 2020: Visions of Engineering in the New Century", and "Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering Education to the New Century" by the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) in the US, and the "Educating Engineers for the 21st Century" by the Royal Academy of Engineering in the UK. These reports analyzed the changes that are taking place in the engineering profession in order to anticipate how the future will and should look like. Based on that, recommendations for action were given to define the characteristics of the future engineer.

In Qatar, the Qatari government has recently announced the country vision for 2030 (Qatar National Vision 2030, QNV2030). The vision relies on four pillars, namely Human development, economic development, environmental development, and social development. As the economy and development of Qatar relies heavily on oil and gas and as there is an ambitious plan in place to move to a knowledge based economy, it is believed that engineers will need to play a key role in achieving QNV 2030, and that it will be important to take into account some specific characteristics of the Qatari engineering profession, such as the high proportion (60%) of female engineers in the College of Engineering of the only National university in Qatar i.e. Qatar University.

This paper describes the guiding principles in doing the study, developing the methodologies that will be used and ensuring that the expected outcomes are realized.

1. Introduction, Perspective and Guiding Principles 1.1 Population Size According to the latest census, the total population of Qatar is 1.58 millions of which Qatari nationals represent only 20%. Considering the male/female ratio of the population we notice that female constitute only 22% of the population which reflects the fact that a large ratio of the population is of labor nature. The two major industries in Qatar that attract this kind of labor are the oil and gas, and the construction industries. But, in an apparent paradox,the ratios within the universities in Qatar, we notice that female students are dominant: about 70% of QU students are females. Even in the College of Engineering, females constitute 60% of the student population. The reason for this female dominance is that many potential male students decide to join the army after high school while others decide to go for vocational training at the Qatar Petroleum training center or at the college of the North Atlantic which offers two and three years diplomas. In addition, many of the male students who are actually interested in Higher Education choose to go overseas, while for cultural and social reasons, female students prefer to stay closer to home. As a result, engineering schools in Qatar are now graduating more female students than male ones. Due to some of the cultural constraints, the question of fitting females in the workplace has

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Hasna, M., & Hamouda, A., & Boashash, B. (2010, June), Preparing And Educating The Qatari Engineer Of 2030 Paper presented at 2010 Annual Conference & Exposition, Louisville, Kentucky. 10.18260/1-2--16150