How many jobs are on offer at MENA recruitment shows?

Career fairs might help shape potential recruits' opinions of labor market opportunities

• More than half of the companies represented at Tawdheef were from the public sector
• Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) were noticeably absent

In “The Vocational School Fallacy in Development Planning” Foster (1964) remarks “Aspirations are determined largely by the individual’s perception of opportunities within the exchange sector of the economy, destinations by the actual structure of opportunities in that sector”(p. 151). 

From this perspective, career shows serve as an important bell weather that calibrates the public’s perceptions of labor market needs.

Last week, Abu Dhabi hosted its annual Emiratization career fair Tawdheef. Assuming that Foster’s assessment of labor market decision-making is accurate, the over 30,000 people, 44% of whom were Emirati, presumably shape their opinions of labor market opportunities based on the companies participating in the such events. 

The Tawdheef exhibitor list shows that 50 companies participated in the event:

• Approximately 54% of the companies attending the event were public sector companies or government-owned corporations, with the remaining entities from the private sector
• The majority of company exhibitors were from the Finance, Insurance, And Real Estate, Manufacturing, Public Administration, and Transportation, Communications, Electric, Gas, And Sanitary Services sectors

Conspicuously absent were representatives of the UAE’s small and medium sized enterprise (SME) sector.

This was despite the prominence of the sector in the UAE and the high employment concentration in small businesses in the UAE and across the Arab region. This was also the first time in the past six years Tawdheef has been hosted that only firms with immediate job opportunities for UAE nationals were permitted to exhibit. 

To assemble the below estimates we relied on data from official Tawdheef communications in the media. To approximate the number of jobs on offer for the remaining exhibitors which did not list the quantity of jobs they were recruiting for at the event, we scoured the online recruitment sites of each company and consulted the sites of Tawdheef’s recruitment partners (Bayt.com, Akhtaboot, GovJobs, and Monster.com).  In many cases, companies which participated in Tawdheef did not have any jobs listed on online recruitment channels which career fair attendees could apply to.