Western finance professionals who face an uncertain future at home are searching for work in the UAE in rising numbers. The number of Americans using Google to search for finance jobs in Dubai has more than doubled in the last year, as a wave of redundancies, restructuring and uncertainty rocks the US financial sector. More than 20,000 US-based finance professionals lost their jobs in the past year, according to a recent study by the US payroll company ADP. In June, a Bloomberg survey predicted that the global financial industry will cut 175,000 jobs in the coming 12 months.
Meanwhile, workers at the Dubai International Financial Services Centre (DIFC) are busy building a 35,000-space car park - the world's largest - to meet rapid growth in the Gulf's most successful finance zone. An acute shortage of financial and technical talent is routinely cited as a bottleneck to growth in the GCC, pushing companies to offer bigger and better benefits to lure foreign professionals.
But a look at recent trends in Google searches, made possible by the company's newly released Google Insights service, suggests the chaos in Western markets is lending a helping hand. At the beginning of last year, Google users were as likely to search for finance jobs in Dubai as they were for the same jobs in the global financial centre of New York. When New Century Financial, the largest US subprime mortgage lender filed for bankruptcy by the end of April, job hunters were almost one third more likely to search in Dubai.
By the end of July this year, the gap had widened to more than two to one. US job hunters have also shown growing interest in finance jobs in Bahrain, Qatar and Abu Dhabi. Their logic is not surprising. Work on Wall Street will remain difficult to come by for the foreseeable future. At least 33,000 finance professionals in New York City are expected to lose their jobs by the middle of next year, according to figures from the city's Independent Budget Office.
With the crisis now spread beyond the shores of the US, major job losses are also being seen in London, which vies with New York as the centre of global finance. The Confederation of British Industries expects at least 10,000 financial sector job losses this year. And much like their US colleagues, British bankers are showing an increasing interest in the tax-free, perk-heavy lifestyle the UAE can offer to their kind. In the UK, Google searches for finance jobs in Dubai have more than doubled in the past three months alone.
tgara@thenational.ae
