Oman has begun implementing a new promotion system for Omani civil employees working in units of the State’s Administrative Apparatus, with RO10 million allocated for promotions in 2026.

The Ministry of Labour announced the implementation during a media briefing in Muscat, outlining new promotion pathways, eligibility requirements, assessment criteria and the role of promotion committees in government units.

The system provides three routes for career advancement: a fast-track pathway for exceptional performance, a flexible pathway based on preferential selection and a special pathway designed to support the retention and attraction of employees with rare or highly specialised skills, an Oman News Agency report said.

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Abdullah Muhanna Al Kharousi, director general of Administrative Audit and Follow-up at the Ministry of Labour, said the first two pathways would be applied in the order specified by the regulations. The special retention and attraction pathway, meanwhile, would be applied at the discretion of the head of the government unit based on operational requirements and the conditions set for that route.

Three pathways for promotion

Under the fast-track pathway, known as “Promotion for Exceptional Performance,” an employee must have spent at least three years in the grade immediately below the grade associated with the position sought.

The employee must also have received three performance appraisal reports rated “Excellent” under the Ejada system.

Promotion under the pathway cannot extend beyond the end of the employee’s career progression under the Job Classification and Ordering System established by the then Civil Service Council under Decision No. 10/2010. The employee must also have no outstanding impediment to promotion.

The second route, “Promotion by Preferential Selection,” uses a points-based system to rank eligible employees. Candidates are assessed out of 100 points, with job performance accounting for up to 75 points and individual competence accounting for up to 25 points.

The performance component is calculated using three-quarters of the average of the employee’s three highest performance appraisal reports in the grade currently held.

The individual competence component is divided into two areas. Up to 12.5 points can be awarded for an employee’s readiness to assume a higher position, while another 12.5 points can be awarded for the development of the employee’s skills and capabilities relevant to the position.

The direct supervisor is responsible for assessing the individual competence of employees nominated for promotion under the two criteria.

To differentiate between candidates, the assessment scores are distributed according to set proportions. No more than 10% of nominated employees under a supervisor can receive between 20 and 25 points, while no more than 35 per cent can receive between 15 and 19 points. Up to 50 per cent can receive between 10 and 14 points, while 5 per cent can receive between one and nine points.

The assessment is then submitted to the higher supervisor for approval.

How ties will be resolved

The ministry has also established a sequence of criteria for resolving ties among employees competing for promotion through preferential selection.

If candidates have the same total score, priority goes first to the employee with the higher combined score in the two most recent performance appraisal reports.

If the candidates remain tied, the employee with the higher score in the latest performance appraisal report takes precedence. If there is still no distinction, priority goes to the employee who has occupied the financial grade from which the promotion is being made for the longest period.

The next criterion is the employee’s date of appointment, followed, if necessary, by age.

The preferential-selection pathway also requires financial allocations for promotion to be available in the government unit’s budget.

Employees must have spent at least three years in the grade immediately preceding the grade associated with the position to which they are seeking promotion. They must also have received three Ejada performance appraisal reports rated at least “Good.”

Unlike the fast-track pathway, an employee exceeding the end of the career progression specified under the Job Classification and Ordering System does not, by itself, prevent promotion through preferential selection. Other impediments to promotion, however, remain applicable.

Special route targets scarce skills

The third pathway, “Retention and Attraction Promotion,” is intended for positions considered critical to the core competencies of a government unit and requiring rare expertise or highly specialised skills that are difficult to recruit or replace.

Promotion under this pathway is decided by the head of the government unit and is subject to specific conditions.

Promotions through the route cannot exceed 1% of the budget allocated for promotion through preferential selection.

The employee must have spent at least three years in the grade immediately below the grade of the position sought. Exceeding the end of the career progression under the Job Classification and Ordering System does not prevent promotion under this pathway, provided the other requirements are met.

The employee must also have no impediment to promotion.

Promotion committees to oversee process

The new system requires each government unit to establish a promotion committee through a decision by its head.

Each committee must have an odd number of members, with no fewer than three members in total. The committee chair must hold a position at least at the level of director general.

The decision establishing the committee must also designate a secretary. The secretary participates in the committee’s work but does not have a vote.

The committee is responsible for receiving promotion applications from the relevant division and checking whether candidates meet the prescribed conditions, criteria and controls.

Where a nomination does not contain sufficient supporting documents, the committee may discuss the reasons and basis for the nomination with the higher supervisor or direct supervisor, depending on the case.

The committee then submits its recommendations on eligible employees to the head of the government unit, within the financial allocations available for promotions.

The ministry said the human resources division in each unit will prepare an annual list, based on the unit’s job budget records, of employees who meet the promotion requirements. The list is to be submitted before the end of January each year.

Rules set out promotion impediments

The ministry has also specified circumstances in which an employee cannot receive a promotion.

An employee cannot be promoted while serving a period of imprisonment. Promotion is also barred while an employee is suspended from work or referred for administrative or criminal accountability, although the relevant post grade remains reserved for the employee during that period.

If an employee is ultimately not convicted, or receives only a warning or a salary deduction of no more than five days, the promotion must be restored to the date on which it would have taken effect had the employee not been referred for administrative accountability or to the competent courts.

An employee also cannot be promoted if the most recent performance appraisal report carries a “Weak” rating.

Restrictions also apply following certain disciplinary penalties. In the case of a salary deduction lasting more than five days and up to 15 days, promotion is barred for six months. Where the deduction exceeds 15 days, or salary is reduced by a proportion of no more than 10 per cent, the waiting period is nine months.

Promotions to be issued twice a year

Promotion decisions will be issued by the head of each government unit twice annually, with promotions taking effect on Jan. 2 and July 1.

Where a promotion decision covers multiple employees and their promotions take effect on the same date, seniority will be determined according to the length of time each employee has held the grade from which the promotion is being made.

The ministry has also set out a formula for distributing the RO10 million promotion allocation among the government entities covered by the system.

Under the formula, each entity’s share will be based on its proportion of the total number of employees eligible for promotion across all covered entities.

The allocation for each entity will therefore be calculated by dividing the number of eligible employees in that entity by the total number of eligible employees across all entities and multiplying the result by RO10 million.

The ministry said the formula is intended to link each entity’s allocation directly to the number of employees eligible for promotion.

The approach also provides a standard calculation method and takes differences in the size of government entities into account. Entities with more eligible employees receive a larger allocation under the formula.

The full RO10 million allocation is to be distributed among the entities covered by the system.

Annual funding could increase

Al Kharousi said the annual amount allocated for promotions is not fixed and could be increased whenever the government decides to do so.

He also said employees occupying temporary positions are not covered by the promotion system because those positions do not have job grades included in the schedule of grades for established posts.

The exclusion means that the new promotion mechanisms are tied to established positions and their corresponding grades within the government job structure.

Mohammed Mubarak Al Kalbani, Director General of Development and Quality Assurance at the Ministry of Labour, said an electronic system linked to Ejada would support promotion committees in carrying out the requirements associated with the process.

The system is intended to provide committees with electronic support as they assess applications and apply the promotion requirements.

Al Kalbani also said the Ministry of Labour would maintain ongoing communication with promotion committees in government units. This would take place through reports intended to verify implementation or through the ministry’s relevant divisions.

Implementation begins in 2026

The new promotion framework is now being applied from 2026, with the RO10 million allocation providing the financial basis for this year’s promotions.

The system introduces different routes depending on employee performance, competitive assessment and the strategic importance or scarcity of particular skills.

For exceptional performers, the fast-track route relies on sustained “Excellent” performance ratings. The preferential-selection route uses a 100-point assessment that combines performance and individual competence. The retention and attraction route is reserved for employees in positions requiring rare expertise or specialised skills.

The framework also establishes a formal role for promotion committees within government units and sets out procedures for preparing candidate lists, verifying eligibility and submitting recommendations.

The ministry’s announcement provides government units with a defined process for allocating available promotion funding and assessing employees under the three pathways.

The media briefing was attended by Said Abdullah Al Balushi, Undersecretary of the Ministry of Labour for Human Resources Development, as well as officials, specialists and representatives of units within the State’s Administrative Apparatus.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday praised Indian pilot Smit Machchhar as a hero after he reportedly was the victim of an altercation on a flydubai flight travelling from Dubai to Tel Aviv.

Flight FZ1073 transmitted emergency signals on Wednesday before making a sharp descent of more than 17,000 feet from an altitude of 34,000 feet. The aircraft was subsequently diverted to Prince Sultan Bin Abdel Aziz Airport in Tabuk, Saudi Arabia.

The flight was carrying 174 passengers, including 27 children.

“Captain Smit Machchhar is a HERO. In the face of the gravest danger and despite being seriously injured, he showed immense courage and an unwavering resolve to protect the lives of others. His valour helped save hundreds of lives and avert a great tragedy,” Modi said in a post on X.

The prime minister added that India was proud of Machchhar and prayed for his speedy recovery.

Pilot’s actions draw praise

Addressing the centenary celebrations of the Union Public Service Commission at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi, Modi again highlighted Machchhar’s actions, saying the pilot demonstrated patience, presence of mind and courage despite suffering serious injuries, a PTI news report said.

“The incident that occurred yesterday, Captain Smit of India demonstrated remarkable patience, presence of mind, and courage,” Modi said.

Modi said he had spoken to Machchhar’s father Bhupendrabhai, mother Gitaben and wife Sonalben to enquire about his condition. The pilot remains under medical treatment in Tabuk.

“I appeal to all citizens of the country that we all pray for Smit’s long life and good health and let us honor Brother Smit, who has enhanced the pride and honor of India,” Modi said.

Veteran aviator

Machchhar is a seasoned commercial pilot and currently serves as a direct-entry captain with UAE-based Flydubai.

According to ANI, he has more than 13 years of commercial aviation experience and about 9,750 flying hours, primarily operating Boeing 737 aircraft.

Before joining flydubai, Machchhar spent 11 years with Indian carrier SpiceJet, where he served as a Line Training Captain.

UAE customs authorities foiled an attempt to smuggle 16.2 kilogrammes of crystal methamphetamine concealed inside the tyre of a vehicle entering the country through a land border crossing, state news agency WAM reported.

The seizure was carried out by UAE Customs, represented by the General Directorate of Ports Security at the Federal Authority for Identity, Citizenship, Customs and Port Security (ICP).

Customs inspectors became suspicious of the vehicle after advanced scanning systems detected unusual indicators, prompting a manual inspection.

The search uncovered the narcotics concealed inside the vehicle tyre, with the operation carried out in cooperation with the Customs and Security Support Department’s K9 unit, which specialises in narcotics detection.

The General Directorate of Ports Security has recorded 765 narcotics seizures since the beginning of the year, involving approximately 390 kilograms of narcotics and 50,000 narcotic pills, WAM reported.

ICP said it would continue to develop its inspection capabilities as part of efforts to combat drug smuggling and protect the security and safety of society.

For most of its history, the finance function had a clear job: control the costs, close the books, report the numbers. That job has not gone away, but across the Middle East it is no longer the point. Boards and chief executives now want their CFOs in the room where strategy is made, financially stress-testing the options, deciding where capital goes and tracking what it earns back.

Javed Iqbal, partner and CFO Program Leader at Deloitte Middle East, calls it a shift from a “licence to operate” mindset to something more forward-looking, the CFO as a catalyst for the wider business rather than its controller. It is a change that runs deeper than job titles. It is reshaping how finance is delivered, from shared service centres to global business services, how it is governed, and which skills matter, as the discipline moves, in his words, “from an accountant mindset to a greater analyst mindset.”

Iqbal, who led the recently held two-day Next Generation CFO Academy in Riyadh, talks to Gulf Business about the next generation of the finance operating model, where AI is genuinely earning its keep and where the hype still outruns the business case, and what will separate a high-performing CFO function from an average one over the next five years.

CFOs across the Middle East are being asked to do more than control costs and report numbers. How is the role itself changing, and where are you seeing the biggest shift in expectations from boards and CEOs?

The business is asking CFOs for ever-increasing inputs on enterprise strategy development and execution. From financially evaluating strategic options to optimum resource allocation and monitoring returns on investments. In addition, driving improvements around revenue growth, sustainable cost management, asset financial management and efficient funding.

In effect, shifting from a “license to operate” role around an operator/controller mindset to delivering as a forward-looking strategic/catalyst for the wider business.

Many companies in the region have spent years building shared service centres and centralising finance functions. What does the next generation of that model look like, and where are businesses still failing to capture the efficiencies they expected?

The finance delivery model has three key components: operations, governance, and business partnering. Operations has been on a journey from centralising transactional processing to building shared services to deploying value-creating global business services. Global business services has characteristics of being customer-centric, multi-functional, centres of excellence, outsourcing and digitally enabled. In essence, building scalable, resilient, and flexible back office platforms to enable growth.

Governance is going from financial controllership to business controllership, and business partnering from financial planning and analysis to enterprise performance management. Efficiencies will come from becoming customer-centric, focusing on the future of work (industrialisation and specialisation), and fully enabling digitalisation, including AI.

Cost pressure remains a major concern for companies, but aggressive cost-cutting can undermine growth. How are CFOs balancing margin protection with continued investment in technology, talent and expansion?

Taking a longer-term sustainable cost management approach rather than just deploying short-term tactical fixes that hurt growth. A longer-term approach challenges current services, operating models, deployed assets, cash management, and longer-term funding structures. Building more resilient and agile cost structures, leveraging partners and ecosystems.

ERP modernisation and AI are now central to finance transformation strategies. Where is AI already delivering measurable value in finance functions, and where is the hype still running ahead of the business case?

Firstly, the co-existence of multiple digital applications is pivotal to long-term value creation for finance functions. AI has huge potential to deliver process automation and even greater value-added capabilities on the advanced analytics agendas.

Currently, there is still a gap in achieving the full required ROI, but this will be bridged by taking a more holistic approach rather than just point-focused use cases. This holistic approach includes linking AI learning with data maturity, re-imagining work and transforming operating models with robust governance.

As companies automate more transactional finance work, which roles or skills are likely to become less important, and what capabilities will define the next generation of finance leaders?

Controllership and business partnering will become the dominant roles required, with finance building greater digital literacy and superior interpersonal skills, so that its workforce can manage digitally enabled processes and deliver advanced predictive and prescriptive insights

Finance transformation (FT) programmes can be costly and disruptive. What are the most common reasons these projects fail to deliver the promised return on investment, particularly in the Middle East?

More FT programmes would deliver superior efficiency and effectiveness if they leverage a more holistic approach. There is a seven-step approach that connects customers, services, work done, digital enablement and capability delivery, structure and sustainability. Also, ensuring Business, IT and HR work together with finance to develop and deliver the finance function of the future. The silver bullet is putting finance people at the center of the transformation.

In the near future, what will separate a high-performing CFO function from an average one, and which of today’s finance priorities do you think companies are underestimating?

A high-performing CFO function will be ‘famous’ for driving business insights as opposed to processing transactions. The skills in finance will include not just technical finance but also statistical, mathematical, data and digital individuals.

In effect, financial analysis coupled with business and performance analysis. Shifting from an accountant mindset to a greater analyst mindset

Google has unveiled Gemini 4 Argon, its most powerful artificial intelligence model to date, as the technology giant steps up its push to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic at the frontier of the rapidly evolving AI market.

The new model anchors Google’s Gemini 4 generation and has been designed to handle complex, long-running tasks spanning software engineering, enterprise work and cybersecurity.

Argon is larger than Google’s previous top-tier Pro models and is being positioned against the most advanced systems from rivals OpenAI and Anthropic, Reuters reported.

Google said Argon was built to “sustain deep reasoning across complex, long-horizon workflows”, with the company initially rolling it out to a select group of cybersecurity organisations through its Fairwind Program.

Broader access will follow in phases as Google tests safeguards and gathers feedback. The company said developers, enterprises and consumers would eventually receive access, beginning with paid API customers and Google AI Ultra subscribers, although it did not give a firm release date.

The model will launch at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, according to Google.

One of Argon’s biggest technical changes is a dramatic expansion in the amount of content it can generate during a single task. Google has increased the model’s output limit from 64,000 tokens to one million tokens, giving it greater capacity to work through lengthy and complicated problems.

Google said thousands of its employees are already using Argon internally for coding, research and writing.

Among the examples highlighted by the company, Argon helped Google researchers improve the efficiency of a quantum computing process by 40 per cent, while teams of AI agents identified data-centre memory optimisations that have freed more than 300 tebibytes of capacity.

Google is also deploying Argon agents to help migrate large C and C++ codebases to the Rust programming language.

Cybersecurity takes centre stage

Cybersecurity is emerging as one of the biggest battlegrounds for increasingly capable AI models.

Google said Argon can autonomously identify, validate and patch critical software vulnerabilities, with trusted cybersecurity partners receiving versions of the model without some of the guardrails that will apply to general users.

Cybersecurity company Wiz is already testing Argon through its Scan for Good initiative. Google said the model identified a critical vulnerability affecting healthcare software used by hospitals that previous frontier AI models had missed.

The company is meanwhile working with the US government under its voluntary process for pre-release access to advanced AI models.

Google’s launch comes as competition among the world’s leading AI developers intensifies. OpenAI and Anthropic have continued to push increasingly capable models into coding and enterprise applications, putting pressure on Google to demonstrate that its Gemini platform can compete at the top end of the market.

Google said Argon delivers performance comparable with frontier models including OpenAI’s Astra and Anthropic’s Opus across key coding and cybersecurity benchmarks.