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29 March 2024

Happy times are here... Dubai job seekers take your pick

Published
By Sneha May Francis

There’s a ray of hope for job seekers in the UAE, with recruitment agencies marking an optimistic forecast for 2012, based on a positive recording for the first quarter of the year.

And it’s the medical and financial sectors that are much in demand. “There’s still some way to go, but the first quarter of 2012 has seen the Dubai market pick up quite a lot, while Abu Dhabi has slowed down,” elaborated James Curtis, Director Charterhouse Partnership, a leading recruitment firm in the UAE. 

In fact, he claimed there’s also a “push from the other emirates, increasingly from Fujairah, where a new mall opened recently”. Throwing light into which jobs are the most sought-after, an agent from the Career Jet employment site claimed that the “medical sector workers are currently in high demand”, and Curtis chipped in about how “finance has (become) one of the busiest sectors through the first quarter of 2012, while hospitality and retail are also in high demand”.

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While the Career Jet official listed out “nurses, dentists, drivers, mechanics, airport workers, financial analysts, surveyors, aerospace supervisors/ inspectors/managers, accountants/auditors/logistics workers,” among the toppers in the job market today, Curtis catalogued, “interior design/fit-out, facilities management, finance (mid-level), professional support/administration, and claims management and technical sales” to his toppers’ list.

The most-sought-after sector gets further divided into what’s projected by the job-seekers and recruiters. Curtis picked management roles as the most popular among the candidates, “as it gives them enough opportunity for career progress”. The CareerJet official added “public sector - medical positions such as nurses, dentists; military and security positions; oil and gas industry positions; and construction and transportation sector workers such as drivers and mechanics” to the list.  And, from the recruiters’ point, it’s the highly-qualified profiles like financial analysts, IT experts and engineers who are much in demand.

Commenting on the other sectors, Curtis added, “Construction is still slow, however on the flip side, the ever increasing real estate market means there are opportunities in facilities management. Professional support, sales & marketing have also shown good growth”. If there’s an industry that isn’t quite a topper, it’s the Oil and Gas, only because it’s a “specialised market. I wouldn’t say there are few-takers, however, there are absolute “prerequisites from clients for this and other highly technical areas,” he explained.

The salary, which ranges “greatly from anywhere 12K upwards”, couldn’t be singled out as the only factor that determined the popularity of these job titles.

“There’s a demand in the market for these jobs,” Curtis explained.  Some experts even stressed that under the current economic climate “majority of advertised job positions do not stipulate the exact salary. Nowadays, companies negotiate it based on experience and qualification of the candidate”.