Retaining talent takes dedication

▶ Keeping valuable employees involves fulfilling their needs

Areport by the 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 skillsets required by the evolving marketplace.

It also means addressing the desires of the millennial generation that tends to look at job-hopping as something more than just 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

Today people gravitate to Dubai and the UAE much like immigrants in the early 1900s, when they headed to New York

employee to grow and learn. When that’s lacking people tend to look elsewhere as they seek to advance their knowledge base.

The talent pool in the Arab world has customarily looked towards 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 standards of living.

The reasons for going to America changed over the past three decades as people looked to America to scale up their careers, 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 conducive to both business and human development.

With time, however, what America was gaining meant that 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, 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 will ultimately have reverberations across companies and industries and boost the confidence of businesses.