The Monster Employment Index Middle East, a monthly gauge of online job posting activity in Middle-East, rose by a significant 14 per cent between February 2013 and 2014, said a top official.

“Monster Employment Index Middle East has shown substantial growth in opportunities vis-à-vis the previous year; growth driven primarily by strong growth in the BFSI; Engineering and Construction; Education and Retail sectors,” explained Sanjay Modi, managing director, Monster.com (India/ Middle- East/ South East Asia).

“We also observe notable improvement in the manufacturing sectors and strong growth in demand for marketing professionals. Recent estimates by economist point at reasonably healthy growth in GCC (4.7 per cent) despite gradually declining oil price.

“Deloitte and Alpen Capital have predicted strong growth for the retail and the aviation sectors this year. The economy is gradually moving away from being oil-led and focusing more on sectors such as retail, tourism, aviation, hospitality and manufacturing which hold the key to employment generation.”

Year-over-Year Trends

Monster Employment Index exhibited improved year-on-year trends in seven of the 13 monitored industry sectors.

•    IT and Telecom/ISP (up 14 per cent) led all sectors by the way of long-term growth.

•    BFSI (up four per cent) continues to chart positive annual growth in online recruitment activity even though the pace of growth has slowed down considerable between January and February.

•    Even though negative Production/Manufacturing, Automotive and Ancillary (down two  per cent) saw significant improvement, up 17  percentage points from -19  per cent in January 2014. The sector also registered the most notable month-on-month growth

•    Oil and Gas (up three per cent) recorded a positive annual growth for the first time since January’13

•    Consumer Goods/ FMCG, Food & Packaged Food, Home Appliance, Garments/ Textiles/ Leather, Gems & Jewellery (down 14 per cent) registered the most notable year-on-year drop among all industry sectors

Occupation Year-over-Year Trends

Eight of the eleven occupation groups monitored by the Index exhibited a positive growth in annual demand.

•    Marketing & Communications/Arts/Creative (up 49 per cent) continues to lead all occupations groups in year-on-year demand

•    Software, Hardware, Telecom (up 43 per cent) professionals saw significant improvement in demand between February 2013 and 2014; a 31 percentage points improvement from 12 per cent in Jan 2014

•    Finance and Account (down 12 per cent) saw the most notable drop in demand between Feb’13 and Feb’14

Geographic Year-over-year Trends

Online job availability improved in four of the seven countries monitored by the Index.

•    Year-on-year, Kuwait (up 29 per cent) followed by Egypt (up 17 per cent) led all seven countries monitored by the Index

•    Oman (up two per cent) saw a positive growth in annual recruitment activity following successive contraction in December’13 and January’14

•    Year-on-year, online recruitment activity in Saudi Arabia (down seven per cent) turned negative for the first time since April 2013; the steepest annual decline among all countries

The Monster Employment Index is based on a real-time review of tens of thousands of employer job opportunities culled from a large representative selection of career Web sites and online job listings. The Index does not reflect the trend of any one advertiser or source, but is an aggregate measure of the change in job listings across the industry. – TradeArabia News Service