The tumbling value of 'Middle East experience'

Back in the early noughties, when the Gulf financial sector was relatively nascent, the expat workforce largely consisted of financiers seeing out the twilight years of their careers, suitcase bankers and young bucks looking to forge a name for themselves in a frontier market.

Time spent working in the region was not considered a boost to your CV in more developed markets like the City and Wall Street.

Then, in 2008, when redundancies were rife in Western markets and demand for candidates exceeded supply in the Gulf, bankers were clamouring to relocate to the region. The Middle East had seemingly become mainstream.

Two years on, after international PR disasters around Dubai World, increasing redundancies and ongoing muted job opportunities in the region's financial sector, have we come full circle?

"The bubble has burst and there's little or no desire among City financiers to move to the Gulf region," says Malcolm Wood, head of front office at UK-based search firm Hamilton Chase. "Having Middle East experience on your CV no longer offers the golden value it did two years ago and with more jobs in the UK, there simply isn't the impetus to move."

Certainly, a number of the high-profile bankers who moved to the region in 2008 are now long-gone. More recently, Lorcan O'Shea, a director in capital markets at BofA Merrill in the Middle East, was lured to head up Deutsche Bank's ECM business for the UK and Ireland.

One Dubai-based headhunter, who declined to be named, suggests that the international perception of the region has been shifted back to how it was before 2007 - as a developing and risky market - because of the headlines around Dubai World and horror stories around banker arrests.

This means attracting international investment bankers has become decidedly more difficult, he claims, and firms are therefore turning to those already in the region.

Expats on-the-ground know better than to subscribe to the international perception of the disintegrating Dubai dream, but should they look to return to Western markets, will Gulf experience be viewed unfavourably? Unfortunately, at the moment at least, the answer is yes.

"No one in the City is openly discriminating against GCC experience and employers are viewing candidates on a case by case basis - on the quality of their work and what they achieved during their time in the region," says David Howell, managing director of recruiters The EM Group. "However, we've encountered a number of candidates who have struggled to find employment here and looked to return to the Middle East."