NEWSFLASHES

Expat workers happy to be in Qatar

More than 80% of expatriate employees said they were happy they had come to Qatar, according to a jobs and employment survey.

Commissioned by tourist and residents’ website qatarvisitor.com and community portal iloveqatar.net (ILQ), the survey attempted to assess how people found work and how that work had changed their lives. 87.6% of employees approved the relocation to Qatar. More than 30% said they found work via the Internet.

On the Internet, 16.1% found jobs via job sites, 7.2% by jobs advertised directly on employers’ websites and 7.2% through uploading their CVs to websites. Recruitment agencies accounted for 16.6% of the positions found.

‘More than a quarter of those who found work in Qatar via agencies claimed they had been illegally charged by those head-hunters,’ a spokesperson said. 

Responding to the question on why people made the move to Qatar, almost half of those surveyed stated money was the most important factor. A substantial proportion - 28.1% - declared they sought work in Qatar in order to experience a new culture. A small percentage (5.3%) said they were ‘looking for adventure.’ 57.2% of those surveyed had a graduate or post-graduate degree, while only 1.8% of respondents claimed to have no qualifications at all.

showed that the majority of employees coming to Qatar experienced a sharp increase in their salary with the proportion of those earning $1,000-$2,000 a month - before relocating to Qatar - going up from 13.7% to 25.7%. The proportion of those earning $2,001-$4,000 a month more than doubled from 12.4% to 25.7%.
 
The survey questioned more than 220 employees working in Qatar. Qatar Visitor editor Philip Beech said: ‘We hope that the results of this survey will help give our users an idea of how to look for work in Qatar, the likelihood of finding work and also what to expect when they get here.

‘The majority of our users actually come to qatarvisitor.com looking for work,’ Beech added.

ILQ official Khalifa Saleh said: ‘The results clearly show that there is increased usage of online portals by those seeking jobs in the Middle East. It’s undoubtedly going to increase in popularity in the future.

‘Unfortunately, the results also show that there is a greater need for the regulation of employment agencies,’ Saleh added.

Source: http://www.propertywire.com/news/middle-east/expat-workers-happy-to-be-in-qatar-200908303454.html
Publication date: 9 sepetember 2009

More news