UAE, Qatar online job postings down a quarter in August

Online job postings in the UAE and Qatar declined roughly a quarter last month as lower oil prices continued to hit sentiment.

In its August 2016 employment index, jobs site MonsterGulf.com recorded declines in online vacancies across the GCC, with the exception of Bahrain and Oman, up 14 per cent and 8 per cent year-on-year respectively.

Qatar saw the largest decrease in the region, compared to August 2015, at 26 per cent, followed by the UAE at 24 per cent, Kuwait at 18 per cent at Saudi Arabia at 2 per cent.

In the wider Middle East, Monster recorded a decline of 38 per cent with Egypt seeing the most significant decline at 46 per cent.

Despite the significant decrease in postings the UAE saw year-on-year growth in the consumers goods sector (20 per cent) IT and telecoms (4 per cent) and production, manufacturing and automotive (3 per cent) and engineering and production (2 per cent).

“It not surprising that the demand for engineering and production talent is increasing as these workers will play a large role in developing the infrastructure for strategic government investments like the Clean Energy Plan 2050 aiming at generating up to 75 per cent of energy needs from renewable sources by 2050,” said Sanjay Modi, managing director, Monster.com, APAC and Middle East.

The largest posting decreases in the country were seen in finance and accounting (41 per cent), customer service (41 per cent), hospitality (25 per cent), HR and admin (24 per cent) and oil and gas (23 per cent).

Online vacancies in the country have decreased 31 per cent between February and August, according to Monster.

In the wider Middle East, hospitality and travel (40 per cent), finance and accounting (50 per cent), sales and BD (62 per cent), HR and admin (64 per cnet) and marketing and communications (64 per cent) recorded the largest decreases year-on-year last month.