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29 March 2024

UAE job opportunities: Hotel jobs surge 40% with room to grow

Published
By Shuchita Kapur

The UAE’s hospitality sector recorded a huge spike in online job opportunities, surging by 40 per cent year-on-year, according to the latest iteration of the Monster Employment Index.

The Monster Employment Index is a monthly gauge of online job posting activity in Middle-East based on a real-time review of tens of thousands of employer job opportunities culled from a large representative selection of career websites and online job listings.

The Index shows that, even as the region suffered from total job losses of 6 per cent on an annual basis (largely due to a 17 per cent decline in online job opportunities in Saudi Arabia and 18 per cent in Kuwait), the UAE recorded an 11 per cent increase in online opportunities over a 12-month period ended February 2013. Qatar outshone all other nations in the bloc with a 16 per cent growth in the said period.

“The employers in the Middle East are continuing to hire with caution. The cautious approach is reflective of the business scenario globally,” said Sanjay Modi, Managing Director, Monster.com (India/ Middle- East/ South East Asia).

Online opportunities exceeded February’12 levels in three of the 12 industry sectors monitored by the index.

Hospitality tops the charts among growth sectors regionally, with online job opportunities in the sector rising 38 per cent between February 2012 and February 2013.

Consumer Goods/ FMCG, Food & Packaged Food, Home Appliance, Garments/ Textiles/ Leather, Gems & Jewellery follow, surging by 16 per cent across the seven countries that comprise the Monster Middle East Employment Index.

Among the slowest growing sectors (negative growth, actually) are chemicals/plastic/rubber, paints, fertilizer/pesticides, recording a 26 per cent decline in online job opportunities, followed by IT and Telecom/ISP, which saw a 22 per cent decline.

Among occupation groups, hospitality and travel exhibited the strongest growth (up 23 per cent) year-over-year; followed by purchase /logistics /supply chain occupations (up 13 per cent). The steepest decline, on the other hand, was witnessed in software, hardware, telecom, declining by 31 per cent, followed by finance and account positions, which saw a fall of 20 per cent year-on-year.

Territorially, Qatar saw a positive growth of 16 per cent, followed by UAE with 11 per cent, Oman 7 per cent and Bahrain with 5 per cent growth. Kuwait registered steepest annual decline of 18 per cent followed by Saudi Arabia with a dip of 17 per cent.