E-commerce companies in Egypt now have a better chance of hiring and scaling with the expansion of a new talent training program. 

Souq Egypt, in partnership with the Education for Employment Foundation Egypt (EFE Egypt), has announced the expansion of the e-Commerce Associate Program, which is designed to identify needed skillsets in today’s modern workplace and develop tailor-made programs that build capability among Egyptian graduate students.  

The E-Commerce Associate Program was first launched three years ago to train talent in the local market to become content associates for Souq Egypt. Now, Souq and EFE have expanded the program beyond Souq's needs, to serve the entire e-commerce market.

The first round of the program, which now teaches marketing, logistics, Google Adwords, supply chain, relationship management, social media, fulfillment, packing, the works, has graduated 120 potential employees. 

While Souq Egypt hired around 20% of the graduates, they encourage the remaining majority to work for other e-commerce sites and expand their knowledge. They would even be ok with graduates heading over to rival MarkaVIP, says General Manager Omar Soudodi. 

"We're taking a longterm view by teaching the fundamentals of e-commerce. There'a a big gap in the market in terms of e-commerce knowledge, and as a company, we see it as our responsibility to train employees."

"But I think at the end of the day, Souq.com will be in their hearts," Soudodi adds. "These initial 20 that they've hired really shined during the training, and we've brought them on board because we already knew we could work with them.

Souq is the number one e-commerce site in Egypt, and in the top 40 most visited sites in Egypt, with 7 million monthly visitors and 370,000 fans on Facebook.  The platform has also consistently grown by 15 to 30% every month, Soudodi revealed a few months ago when we visited their offices, and the demographic of its sellers is changing too; two years ago, 50% were in their early twenties, now it’s closer to 30%, demonstrating that the market is maturing.

Egypt is hardly the only Arab country to face the lack of training issue among its fresh graduates; perhaps this model can be replicated throughout the region, beginning with the countries where EFE has a presence, such as Morocco, Jordan, Palestine, Tunis and Yemen. As e-commerce continues to grow quickly, similar training programs would fill the existing talent gaps in the market. 

Those interested in participating can register through the initiative's webpage here.