Job prospects improve for Emirati graduates

Forty per cent of companies in the UAE plan to hire nationals in the next year, survey shows.

Guests during the seminar about ‘Hiring and Retaining UAE Nationals’ at Careers UAE in Dubai. Pawan Singh / The National

The employment prospects of Emiratis graduating from college is looking up, a survey shows.

“Forty per cent of companies in the UAE plan to hire nationals in the next year,” said Suhail Masri, vice president of sales at bayt.com.

The results are from a survey of 1,270 professionals from the Gulf region in March, comprising a mix of Emiratis and expatriates, with about 40 per cent of those surveyed from the UAE.

The jobs website has 170,000 registered Emiratis.

Seventy-two per cent of respondents in the UAE said local talents receive better pay and benefits than expatriates and 43 per cent said they are appointed to senior management positions because of their fast career trajectories. About half of the UAE respondents said that finding and hiring local talent is extremely easy. But about 90 per cent said that hiring Emiratis for specialised jobs such as IT and engineering is difficult.

However, the No 1 challenge in Emiratisation is education, according to the survey.

“It’s not about increasing the number of graduates,” said Mr Masri. “It is about changing the whole way how we educate our next generation because if we don’t get feedback from the private market and include that in our education system we will not succeed in bridging the gap between the private market, the public market and the education system.”

Emirati officials have also emphasised the importance of education.

With some 20,000 entrants to the job market every year, education is needed to prepare Emiratis for the needs of the workplace, according to Essa Al Mulla, the chief of national workforce development at Dubai’s Emirates National Development Programme (ENDP), an organisation that works to employ Dubai nationals in the private sector.

Every year about 4,500 entrants come to the Dubai job market, according to Mr Al Mulla.

ENDP’s efforts have led to a decline in the unemployment rate from 10.7 per cent in 2005 to 2.6 per cent in 2012 and its aim is to reach less than 1 per cent by 2021.

“The UAE should be a knowledge-based economy in the medium and long run,” said Yassine Otmani, the career services and corporate relations manager at the American University of Sharjah.

“Education is a must if you want to be competitive in the long run with emerging economies.”

Zuhair Al Haj, the director of HR and localisation at the Dubai-based conglomerate Al Futtaim Group pointed out the importance of vocational training.

There is a need for vocational training such as the one that used to be given at industrial schools, which have since been abolished, he said.

Besides pay, working hours and benefits, retention of Emirati employees remains an issue.

That is why Al Futtaim Group supports Emirati employees who have been with the firm for five years by paying the interest on their housing loans, said Mr Al Haj.

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