More people in the UAE are looking for a career change and returning to their studies, according to a leading official at Manchester University in Dubai.
Hiba Abassi, advisors and alumni relations, revealed that over the last three years the university has welcomed around 450 mid to senior level professionals to the global part-time MBA programme.
She told Arabian Business: “These professionals come from top 500 fortune companies and various leading industries.”
The university, which is based in Knowledge Village, also has 47 healthcare professionals currently studying the MSc International Healthcare Leadership course and 20 studying the part-time MSc Reliability Engineering and Asset Management programme.
Abassi said: “Yes people are pursuing further studies. It’s no longer the trend that I have a BA and I’m happy with it. People are constantly furthering their education, whether it’s doing an MBA, whether it’s professional development courses, I think there’s an awareness nowadays, in the job market especially, that you should have an edge.
“How do you get that? Through education, brushing up your skills through the professional development, modules are skills that you can attend and this really helps raise your profile.”
There are also local based accelerator programmes like Jadarah that offer students the opportunity to kick-start their careers under the guidance of leaders from the regional and global digital industry.
According to a recent survey from yallacompare, UAE residents feel less secure in their jobs than they did at the start of 2019 and less confident about getting a salary increase this year.
And Abassi admitted there is an increasing trend of people retraining amid all the uncertainty.
“That is the way how people can change their career. That is the way you can get an extra edge and move up.
“We have two intakes every year in January and July. We see an increasing number of students wanting to join the MBA or other programmes and that’s basically because they want to change their careers or they want to improve their careers, or they want to make a shift or get an entrepreneurship.”
The centre in Dubai was founded in 2006 and has since had 2,500 students on its programme, graduating 1,500.
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