Lost in Transition

Pearson's "Lost in Transition" research frames a problem that is easy to understate in headlines: the space between finishing school and securing stable work is not a short pause for many young people—it is a long, expensive corridor of uncertainty. When that corridor widens across an entire cohort, the economy pays in lost output, delayed household formation, and skills that decay while résumés circulate without signal.

For Saudi nationals specifically, the study estimates that career transition inefficiencies and skills mismatches cost roughly SAR 62 billion in earnings annually. When the lens widens to include non-Saudi workers in the same friction, the figure rises to about SAR 196 billion—on the order of 4.2% of GDP. Those numbers are not moral judgments about individuals; they are a systems readout. They say that fragmented pathways between talent and employers are large enough to matter at a national scale.

What "fragmentation" looks like on the ground

In practice, fragmentation shows up as duplicated effort: students guessing which listings are real, employers re-screening the same profiles with different spreadsheets, and universities lacking a single placement ledger that survives semester turnover. Each actor optimizes locally because there is no shared verification layer that everyone can trust.

NKTA's mandate is to compress that fragmentation for the internship-to-employment pipeline—starting with verified roles, structured workflows, and evidence employers and institutions can stand behind when leadership asks for proof.

NKTA takeaway

If transition gaps cost the economy at the tens-of-billions level, then marginal improvements in "awareness" are not enough. The product bet is infrastructure: fewer handoffs, fewer blind spots, and a marketplace where trust is encoded—not improvised meeting by meeting.