Perceived barriers to work in the private sector in the United Arab Emirates: empirical evidence and policy implications
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The preference for public sector employment among job seekers has been a persistent phenomenon in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region over the past few decades. This paper assesses Emirati senior undergraduate students’ perceptions and willingness to work in the private sector, identifies the factors that shape their work sector perceptions and preferences and examines differences in perceptions and preferences based on demographic characteristics of respondents. Design/methodology/approach Data from 399 students at a public university in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were collected using a paper questionnaire. Both descriptive and inferential statistical methods were applied in the data analysis. Findings Our findings show that low pay and benefits, long working hours, short vacation and more challenging jobs are the key barriers that make the private sector less attractive to young Emiratis. Unexpectedly, our findings indicated that young adults in the UAE did not view job security as a significant factor in choosing the public sector over the private sector. Originality/value This study addresses a gap in the literature by examining the job choice intentions of young citizens in the GCC context, with particular attention to the cognitive and affective factors shaping their strong preference for public sector employment. By uncovering the underlying perceptions and beliefs that shape sector preferences, the study offers valuable theoretical insights and practical implications for workforce planning and policy development in the UAE and the broader GCC region.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".