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No sector has met& Emiratisation target

Experts discuss obstacles and solutions to reduce this gap

Abu Dhabi: There’s not one sector that meets the Emiratisation target, Dr Mouawiya Al Awad, director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research at Zayed University, said.

According to him, the Emiratisation decree covers the banking, insurance and trade sectors.

From left to right: Dr Mouawiya Al Awad (second from left), Dr Naji Al Mahdi, Essa Al Mulla and Fareda Abdulah.  -  KT Photo by Nezar Balout

In the banking (sector), which is the most successful, the Emiratisation percentage currently is 30.4 — that is 11,000 out of 36,000 employees are Emiratis. According to the law, this should be 66 per cent by the end of 2014, he said.

In insurance, the percentage is 7.3 or about 200, while in trade (companies with 50 workers or more), only 1,600 or 1.4 per cent are Emirati workers — a big shortfall from the 20 per cent required by the end of 2014. “If we look at bank, trade, insurance companies, we don’t have one single company that has the correct percentage of Emiratisation, not even one,” Dr Al Awad pointed out.

Citing figures from the Ministry of Labour, he said out of the 4.4 million workers in the private sector, 28,200 are Emiratis.

Perception

Speaking during the Emiratisation Summit held along with the Tawdheef Recruitment Show in the Capital on Wednesday, Dr Naji Al Mahdi, executive director of the National Institute for Vocational Education, said the biggest obstacle in the Emiratisation strategy is perception.

“Emiratisation is not about replacing expatriates with locals…It’s not (about) forcing employers to take on nationals (and) creating false or the same job in the same company.

“It is about empowering nationals to take on their rightful place in the economy with a reward — not a false, forced (or) regulated reward — but a reward that the employer (think they’re worth),” he pointed out. He said Emiratisation is not just creating jobs but careers that Emiratis can develop into. But this means, companies have to willingly take them and groom them for their rightful place in the organisation.

Freeze govt employment

The government sector has a major role to play for Emiratisation to succeed, Essa Al Mulla, executive director of the Emirates Nationals Development Programme (ENDP), said. He cited that high salaries and continuous employment in this sector are hampering efforts to place nationals in the private sector.

“In Dubai, we took a very tough decision, we said let’s freeze employment within the government sector, and this caused a lot of problem at that time. (But) today a lot of Emiratis are saying to us, thank you for freezing the jobs within the Dubai entities, why, because the choices was limited for the Emiratis and the only choice for them was to join the private sector,” he related.

Private sector secondment

Fareda Abdulah, head of HR at Majid Al Futtaim Group, also suggested seconding government employees to the private sector in lieu of sending them overseas for training.

“Take that middle management employee, transfer him to the private sector for two to three months and let him sharpen his skills. Let him see the actual work and let him bring it back to the government and then he will see the big difference. The most important element in this transfer is he would learn innovation rather than just doing the routine day-to-day job,” she suggested.   

olivia@khaleejtimes.com