Retaining talent takes dedication

Keeping valuable employees involves fulfilling their needs

A report by recruitment agency Hays maintains that about 60 per cent of human resources leaders in the Gulf say talent management and retention is expected to be their main area of focus over the next two years.

Retaining an employee is never easy. In the Arab world, the issue is a microcosm of a bigger challenge, which includes the quality of education, and having the right skill-sets required by the evolving marketplace.

It also means addressing the desires of the millennial generation that tends to look at job hopping beyond being part of career development and satisfying an insatiable appetite and curiosity to learn.

To that end, retaining talent has to do with fulfilling the needs and desires of an employee to grow and learn. When that's lacking people tend to look elsewhere as they seek to advance their knowledge base

_______________

Read more:

_______________

The talent pool in the Arab world has customarily looked toward migrating to the West. That is changing and has changed.

Today people gravitate to Dubai and the UAE much like immigrants did in the early 1900s when they headed off to New York in search of jobs and better standard of living. The reasons for going to America changed over the past three decades as people looked to America to scale up their career, much like a startup or SME wanting to evolve to something larger. They did so because of economies of scale and an environment that was both conducive to business and human development.

With time however, what America was gaining meant other countries were losing. The UAE however, has managed to reverse the trend; companies can in this instance learn from the public sector which has managed to put in place the right environment that incubates and retains talent.

No one sums that phenomenon and the need to invest in human capital better than Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Ruler of Dubai, when he coined the term three years ago as the brain regain.

Success in addressing the challenges of developing and improving our region's human capital challenge ultimately will have reverberations across companies and industries and boost the confidence of businesses.