The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development issued Ministerial Decision No. 3568, announced on 7 Muharram 1445 AH, requiring private-sector employers to disclose their annual training activity. It sits inside the wider Vision 2030 push to raise the quality of workforce data, and it is one of the few labour requirements that asks specifically about training.
It is a reporting requirement rather than a training requirement. The decision does not say how much training to run or what it should cover — it says you must be able to state, accurately and annually, what you ran.
Who it applies to
Every private-sector employer with 50 or more workers. The disclosure is annual and is submitted through Qiwa, which sends registered employers periodic reminders as the deadline approaches. The Ministry treats the submitted data as confidential.
The five data points
The disclosure asks for five things about the training year:
- Number of trainees: How many people received training, counted across workers, co-op trainees, graduates, and jobseekers.
- Average training hours: Average hours of training per worker.
- Total cost: The total cost of the training activity carried out during the year.
- Training budget as a share of wages: The proportion of the budget allocated to training, relative to worker wages.
- Types and activities: A description of the kinds of training delivered, broken down by category.
Read as a list of what your records must contain, this is more demanding than it looks. Points one and two need per-person attendance, not a headline total. Point three needs cost attached to activity. Point five needs training categorised consistently across the year, which is the part organisations most often reconstruct in December from memory and invoices.
Penalties
Employers that breach the decision face fines ranging from SAR 5,000 to SAR 30,000, varying with the size of the employer and whether the violation is repeated.
The practical risk for most organisations is not refusal to report; it is reporting late or reporting a number they cannot substantiate, because the underlying data was never kept in one place.
Why the Ministry is collecting it
The stated purpose is data quality: better national visibility of what private-sector employers actually invest in developing their workforce, so that policy and incentives can be set against real figures rather than estimates.
That has a consequence worth noting. A requirement that collects investment figures tends, over time, to be followed by requirements that reference them. Employers whose reported numbers are accurate now are in a better position than those who have been estimating.
What this means for your training record
Every one of the five points is easy if training is recorded as it happens and hard if it is assembled afterwards. Three things make the difference:
- External training counts: Workshops, conferences, and courses bought from outside providers are training activity and belong in the same record. A record covering only in-house material will understate every one of the five figures.
- Attendance has to be per person: Average hours per worker cannot be derived from a total. The record needs to know who attended what.
- Categories should be decided once: Deciding how training is categorised at the start of the year, rather than at reporting time, is what makes point five a query instead of a project.
The separate walkthrough of the Qiwa submission itself covers what the screens ask for, step by step.