Najat Abdalhadi, Head of Communications, Growth Markets EMEA & LATAM at LinkedIn, said:
“In Dubai’s dynamic business ecosystem, it comes as no surprise that the in-demand skills are constantly evolving to respond to market needs and better represent the skillsets that professionals can offer. For example, the ‘Restaurant Management’ skill from 2015 has now split into various niche areas such as ‘Fine Dining’ and ‘Food Service Operations’ – specific skills that match distinct consumer categories within the same sector. It will be exciting to see how the hospitality industry continues to thrive in Dubai as it attracts the talent it needs.”
The Great Reshuffle has resulted in tremendous changes in all elements of how we work; therefore, workers must continue adapting to stay relevant. To understand how skills have evolved, we first identify the top skills a worker had in the past for a specific job and then compare that with the skills a worker today has for that same job.
LinkedIn’s data, produced through its unique view of the labour market, as seen through 800+ million members globally, helps us get a clearer picture of how workers’ skills have changed over time, and how they may need to change in the years to come.
Shift in hiring skills in the United Arab Emirates since 2015
The analysis on this data shows that across all industries, skills changed by 27% on average in the United Arab Emirates since 2015. In most cases, the pace of change accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Digital skills, in particular, are disrupting every aspect of how we work. The pandemic played a major role in establishing this trend, and rising importance of digital disruptive skills will continue to reshape how we work.
This being said, much remains to be seen as the world of work continues to transform, but if changes continue at this pace skills could change by anywhere from 39% to 45% by 2025. Between 2021 and 2025, we would likely see 3 new skills in the top skills for a job.
As we deep dive into the Recreation & Travel industry of UAE, there’s been a change of 35.2% in acquired skills within the industry since 2015, as depicted in the graph below, indicating a shift in priorities of skills in recent years.
- Skills like ‘Hospitality Management’ and ‘Pre-opening’ are replaced by niche and customer-experience focused skills like ‘Hospitality service’ and ‘Guest service management’, with the former dropping to the 3rd and 4th position respectively in top skills needed in 2021.
- There newly emerged skills have been the replacing broad and generic ones, presenting increased industry demand for specialization. This is evidenced as ‘Restaurant Management’ diverges into ‘Fine Dining’ and ‘Food Service Operations’, skills that are suited to different sub-classes within the wider restaurant sector as it continues to evolve and specialize.
- New skills are not always completely new, and many of the top skills today are quite similar to those of the past and workers in these fields may be able to upgrade and refresh their skills fairly easily.
Methodology
This analysis represents the world seen through the lens of LinkedIn data, drawn from the anonymized and aggregated profile information of LinkedIn’s 800 million members around the world. As such, it is influenced by how members choose to use the platform, which can vary based on professional, social, and regional culture, as well as overall site availability and accessibility.
For each job, we identify the most important skills in each year based on LinkedIn’s Skills Genome. The similarity score between two years reflects both the overlap of common skills between each year as well as the relative importance of those skills for each year.
How similar a skill is to another skill is calculated based on how frequently the skills appear together on a LinkedIn’s member profile and other member data.
All data represents aggregated information from the last six years. Available occupations and industries may vary by country, as we only include occupations and industries that meet the minimum privacy threshold. For the year 2021, data used only represents skills added up to November 2021, and does not represent the complete year.
