We went looking for one number: how many ICT graduates Jordan produces in a year. It is the denominator under every skills-gap claim, every training-programme business case and every pitch deck that says the talent is here.
There are three live answers.
| Figure | Source | Published |
|---|---|---|
| ~12,000 for 2024/2025 | DigiSkills Association with MoDEE, Digital Skills Supply and Demand Gap Analysis | October 2025 |
| ~7,000 entering the market each year | int@j chief executive Nidal Bitar | April 2025 |
| ~4,000–4,200 completing a course each year | MoDEE with the World Bank Group, 2022 edition of the same report series | 2022 |
These are not a foreign estimate against a local one. All three come from the same ecosystem: the ministry, the ministry's ICT association, and a report series the association helped produce. The 2022 edition is still hosted on the ministry's own site at a URL that looks current, so a reader arriving today can find 4,000 and 12,000 on government domains without being told which supersedes which.
The highest and lowest differ by a factor of three.
The World Bank's 2020 appraisal is the one worth reading twice. It puts the annual output at 8,000 and then says what happened to them: 1,700, or 21%, work in the field they trained in. That is the only one of the four figures published next to an outcome.
The report disagrees with itself as well
The 2025 report is the most recent and the most detailed, and it does not hold a single figure either. The 12,000 headline sits above a footnote giving the range as "around 8,000 and 12,000", with 2018–2023 cohorts at 8,000–9,000. So the same document contains a headline, a range, and a historical series that does not obviously join up with the headline.
Downstream, that spread compounds. The report states that around 37% of the 2024/2025 cohort secured ICT employment within six months — roughly 4,440 people — against an ICT workforce of 47,840. Run the same 37% against int@j's 7,000 and you get about 2,590. Against the 2022 report's 4,200, about 1,550.
Those are not rounding differences. They are three different pictures of whether Jordan's technical labour market is absorbing its graduates, and the choice between them is made by picking a denominator, not by measuring anything.
The unemployment headline has the same shape
The pattern repeats one level up, and this one is well documented by the Department of Statistics itself.
Its release for the third quarter of 2025 carries a 16.2% unemployment rate. The same release gives 21.4% for Jordanians only. The gap is the non-Jordanian labour force, both numbers are correct, and coverage routinely reports whichever one it met first without saying which population it describes.
The figures that matter for anyone building in education are further down the same releases. Unemployment among Jordanians holding a bachelor's degree or higher was 25.8% in 2024, above the overall Jordanian rate of 21.4%. And 51.0% of the unemployed hold more than secondary education. The Department of Statistics attributes part of the quarter's rise to new graduates entering the job-seeking category on completing their academic year — the statistics office naming the graduate intake as a driver of the rate.
A country where a degree raises your probability of being unemployed does not have a graduate shortage. It has a transition problem, and the 2025 report quantifies the other end of it: entry-level candidates meet employers' hiring criteria in fewer than 20% of cases, and 35% to 40% of ICT graduates reach relevant employment in their first year.
Why this matters more than it sounds
A disputed denominator is not a pedantic complaint. Three things rest directly on it.
Market sizing. Any company selling into Jordanian technical training is sizing its market off one of these three numbers. The addressable population triples depending on which.
Programme evaluation. A training programme graduating 3,000 people a year is reaching a quarter of the national cohort on the 12,000 figure and three quarters of it on the 4,200 figure. Those imply completely different claims about national coverage, and both are defensible from a government source.
Policy targets. Doubling a workforce by a date is a commitment whose feasibility depends on the annual inflow. The association setting the target and the report measuring the inflow do not agree on the inflow.
We are not in a position to settle which number is right, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The 2025 report is the most recent, the most detailed and the only one that publishes its method for the employment follow-up, so it is the one we will use — and we will carry the range with it, because its own footnote does.
What we would like is narrower than a correction. One of these three figures is the current official count. Saying which, on the ministry's site, and retiring the 2022 edition or marking it superseded, would cost nothing and would remove a factor-of-three ambiguity from the base of every education business case written in Jordan. Until then, anyone quoting a Jordanian ICT graduate number should say which of the three they picked.