The below experiences are personal and may not necessarily resemble with one of yours; if so, just ignore the line and move on; there could be others that we both experienced exactly the same way?

Dubai is assumed to be an expensive city but it all depends on your lifestyle.
e.g. I have planned for AED 5000 a month expenses but ended up using approx AED 3000 only for 2 months; of course, I’m good at saving and all that was possible only with cooking skills.

Dubai is best at the banking experience, public relations and transportation.

There’s another side also to Dubai where multiple illegal businesses (of course heard and not experienced) take place, below are some examples:

1. Bed space renting; people take an apartment on rent and create partitions or put up lots of beds and make cheap laborers/workers stay like a herd of sheep. There are few that maintain humanity along the profit and give breathing space – I’ve stayed in one of such bed space sharing.

This one I assume to be harmless until you experience any bad member in the room which is rare and could be helpful to members earning under 2k AED a month.

2. Freelance visa: people make a freelance visa and then fraud of finance happens, where they sponsor laborers from India, Pakistan, Philippines etc for a living expense of as cheap as AED 2000 with food and accommodation and in turn take loans of millions using ones Emirates ID showing the designation of manager and higher roles by depositing so-called salary of AED 20k; shocked right, even I was when got to know this scam..

Simple solution is to avoid giving Emirates ID and phone OTP, handle your banking with help of your children (if the person isn’t technology aware)

3. Above case is even experienced by a few on the name of Europe Visa where they promise you to sponsor a Schengen Visa but the first hop would be Dubai/UAE for 3 months and loans are acquired on ones name with mentioned method in point 2, even the solution is same here.

There are a lot of verified good sides/benefits of UAE:
1. You can get a home loan at 4% ROI or less based on your salary
2. Credit cards are not a way of cheating but a commodity to help citizens; heard that the banks waive off interest charges for genuine medical issues or so.. nowhere can be compared to Indian credit card providers.
3. Personal loans are at max 6% ROI to help one cope up with emergencies and even are misused by few..
4. Transportation is much aligned and easy; but station names keep changing 😀
5. More diversity than India can be seen compared to the size of the nations.
6. With diversity, you also get a variety of food to taste.

More important part – Job Search:

I personally find Dubai/UAE HRs are not well organized, with below observations:

1. You would easily find multiple on-roll open positions that you might not be able to crack 😜
But, if you approach through a third-party contractor/consultancy, you may succeed in securing the job 😀

2. When you apply through these consultancies, few would help a lot while few may only think about their cut (profit).

3. Make sure to search for jobs from your home country, you can make it if you have the potential.
I thought to help local HRs by being available locally here and then started the job search which gave me few experiences but the job hunt was uneasy.

4. The good season is asked mostly for job search, and there’s nothing as such period; summer is way too hot hence avoid your local job search through June to September month.. near to Sep month are mostly the holidays.

5. More important tip about job search, mostly apply to all countries (not necessarily for India :D)
– Always read through JD (common sense right?)
– Based on JD, try to update your matching skills and write-up few lines within your experience about that skill (now felt as not so common? :D)
– Don’t fake the experiences (job title, skills, statements)
– Don’t hope for the reply if your 3 follow-ups are bounced/ignored; with few of the HRs, I tried to followup for 7 times and believe me, they don’t respond if they didn’t answer for the first 3 attempts.
– Try to put a week time between your follow-ups; within a day or 2 would be too quick as per work culture observed here 😀
– Resume shouldn’t be more than a page, try to squeeze as much as possible (seems to common point, right? but unfortunately, not so common)
– More AI and less human interaction with your resume; if you don’t hear back in a week; forget that job listing 😉
– Hiring manager is the decision maker for your skills and Salary (in most cases) HR is just a mediator for comms and compensation letter release; try to use that opportunity to discuss and put closure on your position – then and there (if possible) else might require you to follow up for weeks or months. And again, HR wouldn’t know anything unless feedback is shared, also, HR wouldn’t bother the hiring manager mostly..
– You would hear “In-Sha-Allah” most of the cases/follow-ups; everything is kept “Ram Bharose” in the follow-up calls 😀

6. When switching job/career; always remember/define the purpose for which you want that switch – I realized quite late; after taking a career coaching session
– Money is not everything all the times – also, it shouldn’t be ignored
– If you’re not valued, or compensated properly – makes sense to switch; but first option should be to approach manager/HR for discussion on it; if you’re working with humans rather than machines, you’ve got good chance to stay back, and be more productive 😉
– if you still decide to move on, target a few organizations where your skills, talent, and expertise are matching with their posted/studied requirements; of course you would have to study the organization before applying.
– If you study an organization, there are chances that you may end up creating a position for yourself even if the job is not published on portals.
– I’ve learned from many that the “Unpublished” job market is way bigger than the published one; maybe a thousand times bigger.
– You might have heard about making connections; don’t simply spam everyone with connection requests; there’s a method, only connect with relevant members (HR, Hiring Managers, tech members) associated with searched/targetted/studied organization *with an appropriate message/description*

That’s all for this post, let me know for any specific questions/feedback and I would love to interact on those.