Why GCC Organisations Struggle to Retain National Talent

Hiring nationals under formal targets is now routine for private-sector organisations in the Gulf. The ability to retain national talent over several years is a separate matter, and the research shows why it does not follow automatically from hiring.

This article looks at why GCC organisations struggle to retain national talent, drawing on studies from the UAE and Saudi Arabia. It separates what the evidence supports from what remains assumption, and it ends with the parts of the problem that an employer can change.

Is it harder to keep nationals than expatriates in Gulf private sectors?

In Saudi Arabia, the available data suggest it is. Private-sector social insurance records for 2011 to 2016 show a median job tenure of six months for Saudi workers, against 18 months for non-Saudis. For the UAE and the rest of the GCC, a verified public retention rate for nationals does not appear to be available, so claims about the scale of the problem deserve some caution.

The tenure figures come from a working paper from Harvard's Center for International Development, by Farah Hani and Michael Lopesciolo. It also reports that Saudis held 18.6% of private-sector jobs in 2017, while 42% of employed Saudis worked directly for the government. Two limits apply. The data are several years old, and the records do not show why people left, so they describe a pattern without explaining it.

Several of the explanations below sit in organisational design, meaning how roles, career paths and reporting lines are set up, rather than in the attitudes of individual employees. That distinction matters because the first is something an employer can change.

In the UAE, the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation reported that more than 152,000 Emiratis were working in the private sector at 30 June 2025. Gulf News reported that the Nafis programme had helped more than 134,000 citizens join the private sector since 2021. Both figures count people employed at a point in time. Neither shows how long they stay.

Why does the public sector keep pulling nationals away?

The public sector remains a credible alternative on pay, security, working conditions and social standing, so private employers compete with it as well as with each other. Studies in both the UAE and Saudi Arabia find that these factors shape whether nationals stay in private-sector jobs.

A survey of 653 UAE nationals working in the private sector, published by Emilie Rutledge and Khaled Al Kaabi in Human Resource Development International, found that pay and benefits, the nature of the job and career development opportunities all raised intentions to stay. Perceived negative societal sentiment toward private-sector jobs, compared with public-sector jobs, lowered them. In the earlier thesis behind that work, pay and benefits were the strongest positive predictor among those measured, and social perception the strongest negative one. The thesis also concluded that if the pay and benefits gap between sectors were minimised, most of the Emiratis surveyed would be willing to work in the private sector.

The Saudi evidence points the same way. The Harvard paper cites a 2015 Gallup survey in which 78% of unemployed Saudis preferred public-sector work, with job security the main reason, against 14% who preferred the private sector. The authors suggest that the prospect of a public job can shape behaviour in two ways: some nationals decline private openings and wait, while others take a private job and leave when a public one appears. They read short tenure as consistent with the second pattern, while noting that their data cannot show where leavers go next.

Pay is part of the story, though not all of it. In the 2018 labour force survey the paper draws on, low pay was the most frequently cited reason Saudis gave for leaving their last job, at about a quarter of respondents. That leaves most departures attributed to other causes.

Are pay expectations and skills gaps the real explanation?

They explain part of the picture, but the evidence suggests they are incomplete. Employers often point to high salary expectations and thin entry-level skills as the reasons they struggle to retain national talent, and some research supports both. The pattern across studies is that these factors interact with how roles are designed and how nationals are treated once they are hired.

A 2015 survey by EY of GCC employers and students, as reported by Al Bawaba, found a mismatch between what employers expect and what local applicants can deliver. Employers said they struggled to find the skills they needed, especially at entry level. Almost 75% of the students surveyed rated salary as very important in a job, and 59% rated job security as very important. The survey is now over a decade old and is known here only through press coverage, so it is best read as background.

The Harvard working paper offers a structural reading. Its authors argue that a mismatch between the skills available and the jobs being created, together with national workers' beliefs about what counts as suitable work, helps explain why Saudi unemployment persists alongside low private-sector employment. They note that many of the jobs appearing in the economy may not suit the young, educated Saudis who are looking for work. For retention, the implication is plain, though it is an inference: if the role on offer is not the role a graduate expected to hold, an early exit is predictable.

Attributing exits to attitude has a cost, because it points the remedy at the employee. If the cause is a gap in skills, the remedy is development, and career development opportunities were associated with intentions to stay in the UAE survey above. If the cause is a mismatch between the role and the person, the remedy sits in how the role was designed and described before the offer was made.

How do hiring targets affect retention?

Targets increase the number of nationals hired, but they count headcount at set dates, not tenure or career outcomes. That can leave the experience of the role as an afterthought when the pressure is to fill positions by a deadline. This is an inference from how the policies are built, not a finding from the studies above.

The policy design is clear. According to the UAE government portal, private establishments with 50 or more employees must raise Emiratisation in skilled jobs by 2% a year to reach 10% by 2026, with financial contributions for missed targets. Companies with 20 to 49 workers have been required since 2024 to hire at least one UAE citizen, and the minimum monthly wage for Emiratis in the private sector is AED 6,000 from 1 January 2026. The same portal describes incentives for establishments that perform well in training and employing citizens, so the framework is not only about numbers. Rules and amounts change, so employers should confirm current requirements with the ministry.

Targets have clearly widened participation. The question here is narrower: what they leave unaddressed. Saudi Arabia's Nitaqat quota system, which monitors firms' Saudization scores weekly, offers one illustration. The Harvard authors note that most firms moved into compliance within a year. They also describe a scenario, which they present as a hypothesis rather than a finding, in which employers hesitate to discipline underperforming national employees because a lost hire would affect their quota standing. If that dynamic exists, it weakens the feedback and development that retention depends on.

What do nationals experience once they are in the role?

Research points to three recurring issues: roles and career paths that are unclear, workplaces where nationals are a minority and can feel excluded, and social sentiment that treats private-sector careers as lower in status. The first two sit largely within an employer's control.

On roles and progression, the Rutledge and Al Kaabi survey found that career development opportunities raised intentions to stay. A small qualitative study from the University of Pennsylvania repository, based on interviews with four Emirati women, found that participants were drawn to private-sector work by growth, exposure and meaningful work. They disengaged because of a perceived mismatch between workplace structures and their evolving personal and cultural priorities, not because of a lack of ambition. Four interviews cannot support broad conclusions, but the theme is worth testing in any organisation, since official figures reported by Gulf News show women making up about 70% of Emirati nationals employed in the private sector through Nafis.

On integration, a 2010 survey of 310 expatriates and citizens, published in Employee Relations by Mohammed Al-Waqfi and Ingo Forstenlechner, found that Emiratis were negatively stereotyped by expatriates on skills, work ethic and cultural disposition. The sample included more citizens than the labour market does, which limits how far the result generalises. A more recent conference paper from Zayed University, based on narrative interviews with 16 Emirati private-sector employees, reported two themes: colleagues marking Emiratis as an outgroup, and expatriate colleagues deliberately withholding knowledge. The authors link this to expatriates perceiving national hires as a threat to their own job security. They conclude that exclusion from knowledge sharing restricts integration.

Both studies are small or dated, so they indicate a risk rather than a rate. They still describe a daily experience that no pay review or quota would reveal. Whether a new national hire is taught how the organisation really works is a question of culture: the behaviours expected of colleagues and managers when a national joins a team.

What can organisations change themselves?

Organisations that want to retain national talent can most easily influence factors inside the organisation: how roles are scoped, whether progression is visible, how colleagues and line managers behave, and how retention is measured. None of these removes the public-sector pull, but each addresses a factor that the research links to staying. The points below are practical suggestions informed by the evidence, not findings from any single study.

• Define the role before the hire. Set out the scope, decision rights and what the role leads to. A useful check is whether a strong candidate could see what they would be doing in three years.
• Make progression visible and time-bound. Career development opportunities were associated with intentions to stay in the UAE survey, so a stated route to the next level is more useful than a general promise.
• Benchmark the whole package against the public alternative. That includes working hours and leave as well as base pay, since the Emirati thesis concluded that narrowing the gap in compensation and benefits would widen willingness to work in the private sector.
• Create early exposure. Rutledge and Al Kaabi found that respondents who had completed private-sector internships reported a significantly higher intention to remain, which suggests that familiarity helps normalise these careers.
• Prepare teams as well as the new hire. Set expectations for knowledge sharing, and pair national hires with mentors who connect them to senior decision-makers. Line managers carry much of this, so their preparation matters.
• Measure retention by cohort and ask why people leave. Track tenure by hiring year and role, and record exit reasons. The Saudi social insurance data cannot show why people leave, which makes an employer's own exit data the only source for this.

What do we still not know about national talent retention in the GCC?

A great deal remains unclear. The evidence base is concentrated on the UAE and Saudi Arabia, leans on small or cross-sectional studies, and in places uses data from several years ago. This article does not cover Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain or Oman, each of which has its own labour policies, and no verified public retention rate for nationals in the UAE was found.

Conditions are also moving. The UAE minimum wage for Emiratis, the quota targets and the support programmes have all changed in recent years, so earlier findings may not describe today's experience. What the studies do show consistently is that the effort to retain national talent is shaped by factors that sit after the hire: the role, the career path, the workplace and the social standing of the sector.

A simple test can help before the next hiring round. If a strong national hire joined today, could the organisation describe the role they will hold in three years, name who will help them get there, and say how it would know within a year if things were not working? If any of the three answers is unclear, that gap is where retention is most likely to be decided.