Design & Creative job market in the Gulf

How we count

• Jobs open now are live listings on JobXDubai: collected daily from employer career pages and job boards, checked for dead links, with duplicates removed.
• A new job is a listing we first saw within 14 days of its posting date, so an employer's backlog of old adverts never counts as fresh hiring.
• Trends compare like with like: only employers we were already tracking in that country before the period began. When we add a new source, its jobs count as open jobs but not as growth.
• We only show a percentage change on a big enough base: at least 300 new jobs in the earlier period (30 for a single field or skill, 15 for an employer). Below that, small numbers swing too much to mean anything.
• Pay bands are estimates. Most adverts don't state pay, so we estimate it per job. The share of adverts stating pay is an exact count.
• The Hiring Index counts new postings each week from a fixed group of employers we already tracked before its base period, against the average of its four base weeks (= 100). A field gets its own index once it averaged at least 30 new jobs a week in the base period.
• Requirements come from the requirements written in each open advert (years, degrees, licences, credentials, languages). Spellings of the same credential are merged.
• Advertised pay uses only salaries the employer published, never our estimates, and only where at least 30 adverts in a field state one.
• CV figures come from CVs uploaded to JobXDubai, including free CV checks, stored as anonymous statistics: the skills a CV mentions and a likely field. We never keep or publish the CVs themselves.
• Time open runs from posting to closing. It leaves out jobs from feeds where we retire adverts ourselves after a fixed age, which would otherwise make every field look the same.
• Tracking began Bahrain: July 2026, Kuwait: July 2026, Oman: July 2026. Updated 28 October 2026.